Dr, Clint Lichty has been studying hog assembly yards to come up with measures to prevent the spread of diseases such as Porcine
Epidemic Diarrhea Virus and he shared his ideas at the Big Bug day held recently at Elora.
The main approach is to keep inbound and outbound trucks and pigs separated, and to keep truckers from walking around by having them handle information electronically instead of personal delivery.
One of the big risks is trucks returning from the United States where they have been cross-contaminated at farms or packing plants.
There are about 340,000 cull hogs and 4,200 truckloads that use hog assembly yards in Eastern Canada, he said.
Besides maintaining separations, he said deadstock trucks ought never come into the arrivals side of the dividing lines, that yards should be well drained so there is no standing water and that there should be one-way gates so pigs can’t go back to where they came from.
Ideally the assembly yards should have high-volume pressure washers to clean and disinfect trucks, but he said that’s not likely to happen any time soon.
Among the next steps are development of engineered drawings for assembly yards, on-farm biosecurity, industry consultation an and an article for a pork-industry magazine, he said.
