IOWA FALLS, Iowa — A biosecurity workshop focused on risks and caretaker entry will be offered at the Marshall County Extension and Outreach office on February 19. The workshop offers pork producers a mechanism to develop a progressively deeper understanding of critical steps in biosecurity and health management. The program uses lecture and activities to demonstrate and identify possible risk events and carrying agents that can compromise a farm’s biosecurity protocols. Herd health is a number one driver of performance and profitability. The workshop enables pork producers to learn from case-studies and prioritize the highest ranking risk events for their own operation. It is timely to review biosecurity in light of endemic diseases but also as the global spread of African Swine Fever continues, we hope it can be kept out of the US, but if not biosecurity becomes that much more important.
“A real outcome of workshop participation would be discovering new ways to think about biosecurity and not be stymied by it.” states Colin Johnson, swine specialist. “We’ll show some hypothetical examples of a farm breaking annually with PRRS then implementing changes to employee entry which reduce the risk to less than to one break in over twenty years.”
The focus at each session will include: diseases of concern, pathogen transmission, risk events, prioritizing farm risks, cost of disease, carrying agents, intervention strategies, best practices, implementing biosecurity culture, and case studies. With the highest ranked risk event generally being employee entry, much of this initial workshop will focus on that. The effectiveness of traffic patterns, bench entries and other measures will be focused on.
Pre-registration not required but requested. The workshop will start at 1:00 PM. To preregister contact Marshall County Extension and Outreach at 641-752-1551 or chelsea@iastate.edu. For further program details or other swine related needs, contact Colin Johnson, swine field specialist: 515-291-9287 or colinj@iastate.edu
— Iowa State University Extension and Outreach
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