The outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea in Canada almost eight years ago highlighted some serious gaps in existing biosecurity protocols.
Those gaps are now being closed in a four-pillar approach, developed as Canada, United States and Mexico hosted a series of forums to look at four areas where improvements could be made, says Red Deer-based swine specialist Egan Brockhoff.
With clients all over the world, including China, Brockhoff has been burning the candle at both ends to help prod, drive, steer and cajole producers to implement biosecurity controls that will harden their barns against disease.
“PED taught us a lot about biosecurity, and it really showcased a lot of our weaknesses. It was a horrible thing, but it showed us where we need to make some improvements,” Brockhoff said in a recent conversation with Prairie Hog Country.
The upshot of that revelation is the formation of a team of specialists, gathered under the flag of the Canadian Pork Council and working with federal and provincial agencies to work on four core pillars in support of their efforts to protect farms from incursion and to manage the outcome if there is a breach.
Pillar 1 is an overhaul of existing standards, including working with federal government agencies to create the Pan-Canadian Action Plan and update national biosecurity standards established in 2010. That update is underway now and should be complete early in the new year, said Brockhoff.
The Pan-Canadian Action Plan has been a fundamental tool in building a defense against African Swine Fever, he said. While the disease has never entered North America, it has existed for decades in some parts of the world. Its migration in recent years has raised alarms with Canada’s swine industry facing utter devastation if it were discovered here, he said. The Pan-Canadian Action Plan has therefore stood an active defense to keep ASF out of the country and to put it a tight wrap around it if it did breach those walls.
“We continue to work off that plan every day. The National Emergency Operations Centre continues meeting in Canada on a monthly basis, coordinating at a nation level, and we have regional working groups meeting very frequently.
“The ASF portfolio continues to move forward on a daily basis,” said Brockhoff.
“We are working extremely hard to keep it out of the country, but if it ever came here, we want to be prepared for it,” he said.
That preparation includes development of geographic zones and management compartments to demonstrate that Canada can contain an outbreak if ASF should be found here, he said.
Geographic zones refer to a response area that would be created around an outbreak, said Brockhoff.
Management compartmentalization refers to the level of biosecurity within a compartment and its relevant ability to prevent an incursion of disease, he said.
“So, a compartment is all about management to prevent the disease. Zoning is a response tool.”
The second pillar, therefore, is the development of a benchmarking system that analyzes each facility’s ability to protect itself from disease. Benchmarks are being established at four levels:
Level 1 — The facility is protected against viruses and bacteria that are not highly infectious
Level 2 – The facility has the capability of stopping diseases like ASF
Level 3 – The facility is protected against diseases like PRRS and PED
Level 4 – The facility is able to stop aerosolized diseases including foot and mouth and classical swine fever.
Those benchmarks and a risk assessment score will allow producers to assess the disease-stopping capabilities of their biosecurity systems, said Brockhoff.
The third pillar is built on creation of a series of staff training videos for commercial producers. A professional animator is working with CPC on this project, with 14 videos completed so far. A set of guidelines is also being prepared for smaller producers to help keep their herds healthy under conditions that are radically different from those on a commercial farm. The training videos are being moved along at the pace of about one per week. Each video is reviewed and audited before it can be released for producers to use, said Brockhoff.
There are plans to feature them in the virtual trade show at Banff Pork Seminar in January, he said. Seminar attendance is free with online registration now open at
That leads to the fourth pillar, which involves reaching out to producers on smaller holdings to help them achieve maximum biosecurity without the structural benefits available to commercial producers.
PigTrace has found a growing number of small producers adding pigs to their operations
“Whether ASF affects a commercial farm with 10,000 or a smaller farm with 100 pigs or two pigs, the impact on the industry is going to be the same,” said Brockhoff.
“So, we’ve really got to work to understand their farming models and what we can do to support them,” he said.
With so much work underway to fill biosecurity gaps on farms, there are still a couple of challenges facing the defense against ASF.
The first of those is the need for continued vigilance at entry points to ensure that it doesn’t ride in with someone’s goody bag from the old country.
The second is the large number of question marks involving the various populations of feral pigs that are scattered across the country, particularly in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
Feral pigs thrive in Canadian conditions and there is really no solid estimate on how many of them are out there, destroying farms and wilderness habitat and potentially spreading viruses picked up from raiding garbage cans.
A national working group has now been established, but there isn’t sufficient surveillance to provide necessary information about those populations, said Brockhoff.
Information about training videos, biosecurity guidelines and other programs mentioned in this article is widely available to producers through the CPC and CFIA websites as well as from provincial pork board. •
— By Brenda Kossowan
