Back in February 2017, Garry Wollmann shared his story with fellow producers and industry representatives at the Manitoba Swine Seminar in Winnipeg, MB.

Wollmann is the barn manager at Clearwater Hutterite Colony near Balmoral, Manitoba where they operate a 700 sow farrow to finish producing up to 17,000 pigs which went under a special contract and premium to HyLife at Neepawa, MB.

In October 2015, the colony began raising pigs without antibiotics, (RWA) program and began shipping RWA pigs in April 2016 taking three years to get there.

The reason the colony decided to go RWA was because of known changes coming re in-feed antibiotic goals making it desirable to wean their operation off of antibiotics as quickly as possible.

Recently Wollmann talked about how things are going.

“Very well up to a certain point last May when the new strain of PRRS (Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome) that’s in Manitoba and it set us back quite a bit,” he said. “We just tried to manage it the best we could.

We lost a lot of pigs because of it. The productivity in the sow herd went down tremendously for a couple of months, and it is back to normal now. But there’s a hole in there, in November and December, where we only shipped half the pigs that we normally would.”

Wollmann said they didn’t change anything but decided to wait it out and hope that it got better every week. And after the first few weeks, it started getting better. The sows began feeling better and eating.

“And then it slowly rolled through the rest of the barn, through the nursery and the finishing pigs. The finishing pigs were running a temperature where they weren’t hungry for a couple of days, not eating what they should so our days to market went up. But overall, the mortality went up but not as much as it could have,” said Wollmann. “Some of the herds that have experienced that PRRS strain has had higher mortality than we did. We were able to manage through it and come out the other side, and the light that we saw at the end of the tunnel wasn’t a freight train; it was just a small, little mini-bike that was coming our way.”

The most crucial factor is the colony did not have to resort to using antibiotics, but simply managed through it.

“We maintained our RWA status, but we did use a lot of aspirin which you’re allowed to do to try to control the temperatures on the sows just to get them to feel better so that they started eating again,” Wollmann said. During this stressful time, HyLife at Neepawa, the processor taking all those RWA pigs under a special premium decided to end their RWA program giving them the one year notice.

“Two of their flows that were producing their RWA pigs got hit with the same strand of PRRS that we had, and they felt that they couldn’t manage through it without going back to empty the barns that housed the pigs. And they had been struggling with raising pigs without antibiotics for a bit as it was before that, so they just decided it’s not worth their time and effort to try and maintain that program,” he said. “We gave them notice on May 2, 2017; we would like to get out of our supply contract. They gave us an offer that we could go out and look for a different processor that puts a contract in front of us; they would allow us to leave our supply contract which you have to give notice for a year.”

Thunder Creek Pork in Moose Jaw, SK came back with an offer which the colony presented to HyLife but decided a shortage of pigs and didn’t release them from the contract until it expired on April 30th of 2018. Currently, they are producing RWA pigs for HyLife but not at a premium but will stay with the RWA program because the contract from the other processor is still in effect and they want the pigs; they want the RWS pigs, and they will pay a premium as soon as HyLife allows them out of their supply contract. •

— By Harry Siemens