Many people ask Dr. John Carr, an international livestock consultant and veterinarian who feeds pigs around the world what he actually does … It is health maintenance and training.

“So to my mind, what I do, which is different, is I have coined the term ‘health maintenance’. So, traditional veterinarians would go out and treat diseases. So, your cow is sick or whatever, calving, whatever. See, I’d run out, the middle of the night, calve the cow, come home. So then, that was fine,” said Carr. “Then about the 1970s, we moved towards preventive medicine, which is using vaccines and fantastic vaccines came in so parvovirus control is then part of the prevention medicine program.”

But the problem with modern pig farming is it isn’t all about preventing medicines.

“There are things like e Coli, there’s ileitis, Lawsonia, where you really have to learn how to farm the problem. The problem can’t really be depopulated away, it can’t be eliminated off the farm. The vaccines are okay, but don’t necessarily cover all of the different strains, all of the different scenarios,” he said. “So, what I practice is this concept of health maintenance. So my job is to keep the animals healthy. And the principle then would be, if I keep the animals healthy and they then get sick, they should respond and bounce back faster.”

Carr, who travels all over the world maintaining the health of animals lives in Australia but visits his parents frequently in England said preventive medicine is less of a problem or less of an interest to him now, like worming. He doesn’t do much worming personally. Pigs on concrete don’t have the same access to the worms. While interesting and doing it while on a farm, farrowing sows nobody can afford to ask him to fly in to Manitoba, farrow a sow, have a cup of tea, and then leave.

So again the concept of the veterinarian with the health maintenance concept is to move more and more into training. So he trains the stock people to be able to farrow the sow.

“So what do you need the vet for? If I can train one stock person, he can then or she can then, farrow a thousand sows where I could never be there for a thousand sows. So the pig actually benefits all round,” said Dr. Carr. In many cases growing up on the farm, the mom and dads of this world several generations back wanted their children to farm and did whatever to make it possible. And that concept, even though many siblings didn’t remain on the farm, the concept still goes with them. That’s what Dr. Carr is talking about when training people to not just farm but to be great people.

“I work with a feed firm, Nutrition Partners, out in Alberta and here in Manitoba, and what we’re going to do this year is change some of our training programs, and move away from pigs per se, but towards people,” he said. “And taking that old fashioned concept where you and I grew up roughly in about the same environment, albeit on two different sides of the planet. But what is the purpose of farming? Every one of the purposes of farming is just to produce good, solid, human beings, who have a sense of teamwork, who have a sense of getting up in the morning, going to work, don’t mind getting dirty. Who will do the concept of an honest day’s work, honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. And some of those values, when you get older, the younger generation seem to be short of some of those values. I’m not entirely sure that’s true. I suspect that when I was younger I didn’t seem to have some of those values either. But you hear it.”

He works with a lot of young veterinarians, but with some really great guys who are frighteningly clever compared to what he was like at their age,” he chuckles. “But I’m privileged to work here in Canada and I see some really great young farmers. And so what we’re gonna do is to change our tactic a little bit and to try and farm these people. Farm these people into good people. And along the way, we’ll teach them something about pigs and management.” Dr. Carr said it’s that respect for people, respect of pigs, kinda be the same thing.

“And on that little note, what we’re trying to do is also make pigs an employee on the farm. And get people to think of pigs more as employees not units of production. But the bottom line is we’re gonna maybe change some of our training programs over to farming people, and along the way, we’ll raise some pork,” he added. •

— By Harry Siemens