Dr. Karine Talbot, the Director of Animal Health with Hylife told hog producers at the February 2016 Manitoba Swine Seminar despite the increased cost, the decision to move from needles to needle-free injection is well worth the investment.

In 2010, in an effort to eliminate the risk of broken needles in meat, Hylife began converting its swine barns to needle-free injection and in January 2011 the company was completely needle free from birth to slaughter. Dr. Talbot, says the biggest challenge in making the switch is training.

“Training is very important but it’s not very difficult to learn. The unit itself is very simple,” she says. “It’s mechanical so you just need to make sure someone is accountable on the farm to do the maintenance. That’s the most important part, so change the O-rings, maintain the unit, oil it but it’s not very complicated, everybody can learn it.”

Talbot says the maintenance, most of it is simple maintenance, changing the O-rings to make sure the pistons are working, that it’s injecting the proper dose so that’s the downside. If it’s not done properly the units will have some issues.

“It won’t inject or it will fire for no reason or it won’t give the right dose but if they’re maintained properly they work very well,” she said. “So maintenance is very important but it’s as simple as changing O-rings. Like any mechanical equipment, there’s some higher maintenance sometimes that must happen after a lot of usage of it but the basic maintenance, our staff can do it.

Dr. Talbot says the equipment is very, very reliable having used the current guns for over five years now. Some, they inject over 6,000 pigs a week, so it’s pretty high usage on those guns, very reliable considering they’re using them in a farm environment with high usage.

The Director of Animal Health with Hylife says needle-free injectors are expensive and, in many cases farms will require multiple injectors to accommodate different sizes of pig but the ability to guarantee customers that there is no risk of needle fragments in the meat justifies the investment.

She says the company now uses needle-free injectors to administer every kind of compound from iron to vitamins to antibiotics to every age and type of pig from birth to slaughter including vaccination during processing at weaning, later in the nursery to finisher pigs to gilts.

“Economically it’s much more expensive than a typical needle and syringe for sure.

The equipment itself is a couple of thousand bucks per unit and every barn will need maybe more than one, depending on how many they need,” she said. “Some of our farms need five needleless injectors for different size of pigs for example. So that was a very expensive change for us but the gain for us was to make sure we could prove to our customers and confirm that we were needle-free and the meat will never have a broken needle in it so that was a gain for us.”

Not to belabour the point, but to stress the importance, Dr. Talbot says broken needles in the meat is a huge issue for the whole industry, not just for Hylife but for everyone selling pigs.

“We need consumers all across Canada to be confident that we produce a safe meat so she encourages everybody to consider needle-free.”

Mike Agar, the Regional Marketing and Technical Services Manager with AcuShot Needle-Free, says the highest use of needle-free technology is to administer iron supplements or vaccines to high numbers of young pigs.

“Let’s say you’ve got a couple thousand pigs to vaccinate and you have a limited amount of time and you’ve got to use needles, possibly repeatedly,” says Agar. “They may get bent or broken in these animals so, in high volume vaccination situations such as nursery pigs getting vaccinated for circovirus, you’re vaccinating hundreds to thousands of pigs at one time. You don’t want that to end up on the food line and have somebody having to deal with that in their roast or their pork chops or whatever.”

He says the processors see this as an opportunity to mitigate risk and optimize food safety. What’s driving this mostly is demand in marketplaces such as the Asian markets where they want a guarantee of food safety from their suppliers.

“We have a number of commercial processors in this country, in particular in Manitoba, that are supplying into those markets where they want to be able to give those guarantees and that’s why they’ve chosen to go needle-free,” said Agar. “Where needle-free is being used they’re not having broken needles.” •

— By Harry Siemens