Feedstuffs in Focus
Feedstuffs in Focus is a weekly look at the hot issues in the livestock, poultry, grain and feed industries. Join us as we talk with industry influencers, experts and leaders about trends and more. Feedstuffs in Focus is produced by the team at Feedstuffs.
Feedstuffs in Focus
Protecting your herd and profits with strong line of defense
The razor-thin margins in today's pork industry demand a laser focus on herd health to maintain profitability. Dr. Nic Lauterbach, Technical Services Veterinarian with Pharmgate Animal Health, draws on his years of industry experience to deliver practical insights on keeping pigs healthy during challenging times.
What makes sick pigs so costly? As Dr. Lauterbach explains, illness diminishes the efficiency of every production input – feed conversion suffers, space utilization decreases, and labor requirements increase. This cascade effect can quickly erode already slim profit margins. The key is developing systems that both prevent disease entry and respond rapidly when health challenges emerge.
Producers should watch for specific warning signs that might indicate brewing health issues. Reduced water consumption often serves as the earliest indicator, followed by lethargy, decreased feed intake, and increased need for individual treatments. Dr. Lauterbach emphasizes the critical importance of establishing a strong health team before problems arise, creating clear communication channels that enable quick diagnostic testing and appropriate intervention strategies. This proactive approach can mean the difference between a manageable health event and a devastating outbreak.
Margins have been slim in the pork industry, making herd health an even more important component when it comes to maintaining profitability. How can the pork industry best keep pigs healthy and minimize loss from morbidity and mortality? Welcome to Feedstuffs in Focus, our podcast taking a look at the big issues affecting the livestock, poultry, grain and animal feed industries. I'm your host, Sarah Muirhead. This episode is brought to you by Pharmgate Animal Health, a growing business that puts livestock first. Pharmgate provides a proven portfolio of technically supported, high-quality products that are the foundation of custom herd health protocols. By offering multiple options for active ingredients, concentrations and administration routes, Pharmgate provides you with the choices to fit your needs and get you the results that you want. Joining us today to talk about protecting your herd with a strong first line of defense is Dr Nic Lauterbach, technical Services Veterinarian with Pharmgate Animal Health.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:So, Nic, to start tell us a little bit about your role with Pharmgate. Your background in the pork industry? Yeah, sure, so I'm Dr Nic Lauterbach. I I'm a technical service veterinarian with Pharmgate Animal Health. I've been with Pharmgate It'll be three years, uh, this fall, um, and before that. So before that, I was a veterinarian within a production company in the Midwest for for four and a half years before that.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:So I've been in the industry just shy of seven years, um, and so my role as technical service veterinarian with Pharmgate is to leverage some of that previous experience, as well as experiences that we learn about in every day, to bring science-based solutions to producers and veterinarians for the for the relevant health challenges that they may be facing. So that's where our group specifically really thrives is that our team at Pharmgate really has a lot of in-barn experiences. So most of us, myself included, have grown up in the ag world, so maybe not necessarily specific to swine, but my family farms in central Iowa. I know that a lot of our team has been around agriculture for most of their careers, and so what we, what we hope to do with our group, is, like I mentioned, bring science based solutions to relevant challenges, because really what we're passionate about is is being in the ag community, being in the swine industry and helping producers and veterinarians kind of work through whatever relevant challenges they may be facing on a day-to-day basis.
Sarah Muirhead:So, with today's slim margins, it's probably more important than ever to keep pigs healthy and to minimize loss from morbidity and mortality. How important is all of that, then, to maintaining profitability.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Yeah, it's critical right.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:It's really hard when you health drives so much of what it is we're trying to do. When you think about the major inputs that go into raising a pig whether that be feed, space, labor all of those become less efficient to a producer when a pig is sick. Keeping a pig healthy just maximizes everything that we're trying to do and so that really emphasizes you know we need to do everything we can to keep these pigs healthy. But also it emphasizes that if we do have a health challenge which we know, you know raising pigs we know we're going to have some health challenges from time to time really makes it critical that we're getting those challenges effectively communicated and intervention started quickly to manage those and to make those, to make the you mentioned the slim margins, to try to minimize those losses as much as possible.
Sarah Muirhead:So if you were to identify what pathogens, what diseases, what do you see as the biggest threats out there right now to produce your profitability?
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Yeah, there's some primary ones and really to me the primary pathogens that we spend a lot of time talking about at Pharmgate with the producers that we meet with kind of fall into two separate buckets. There's the enteric pathogens, and these would be like your porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, your E coli, your salmonella, that they're going to cause challenges on the enteric side, right. So you think about you walk into a barn and you notice some loose pigs or a different fecal consistency, and then you and the other bucket would be kind of the respiratory pathogens, so porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus or pastorella, or actinobacillus pleuronymoniae or APP. Those are kind of the respiratory pathogens that you know. The two main, two primary buckets that we're talking about in terms of pathogen, kind of enteric and respiratory, are the ones we spend a lot of time talking about.
Sarah Muirhead:So of course it's important to catch these things early. If you do have a problem in a barn, how should producers watch out for you know for these kind of diseases? What kind of early warning signs should they be aware of?
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Sure, yeah. So I think obviously you know we talked about enteric and respiratory diseases and each of those are going to have specific clinical signs. So the enteric we've talked about. You're looking for a different fecal consistency than you're used to seeing. Right, the pigs are loose or they may be scouring On the respiratory side. It's what we usually think about. Right, I walk in and the pigs are coughing or they're what we call thumping, which is they're having to work. It just looks like they're having to work really hard to breathe because of some of that damage. That's some of that damage that's going on or has occurred within their lungs.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:More broadly, when I was in practice, the things that I always told our caretakers are to look for and really alert us if anything was going on Just not specific to any specific disease, but just in general tells us, hey, there may be something going on with these pigs. One of the things I always look for was water consumption. Right, is our water consumption reducing, going down? That can indicate that there's a reduction in activity. And reduced water intake obviously can lead to pigs getting dehydrated and we know there's a host of issues that would come along with that.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:If those pigs are lethargic. You walk into a barn and you're used to them getting up and greeting you at the pen or running around the pen and all of a sudden they're not doing that. That would also be a cause for concern If you're seeing your feed consumption drop, seeing your feed consumption drop, if you are walking the pens every day and you find yourself pulling out more pigs than you're used to and giving them injectable or spot treatments what we would refer to as spot treatments. I would also say that those are kind of the four key ones on the front side to look for and say, hey, I may have an issue here. And then finally, kind of a leading or a lagging indicator that you have an issue is if you eventually do start to see mortality right, if you're, if you expect your mortality to be a certain percentage of your population and all of a sudden that's gone up. That indicates that should be setting off alarm bells that say, hey, we need to do something, we need to intervene.
Sarah Muirhead:There's something going on here that's causing this that we need to get to the bottom of. When a producer observes some of these symptoms in a barn, what's kind of the next step to prevent a full disease outbreak? Are we looking at biosecurity, looking at treatment? What's your advice there?
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Yeah, I think, even before we talk about biosecurity and we talk about treatment, I think the the first thing I would always advise is, before we have any sort of health challenges, let's make sure we have a good health team in place, right? Let's make sure we have some people that understand our system, that understand what we routinely are challenged with whether that be production supervisors, whether that be production supervisors, whether that be veterinarians, whomever that may be let's make sure we have a good health team in place so that if, as we have issues, we have clear lines of communication of who I need to reach out to to get input about. Hey, what are the next steps? You know that could look like taking diagnostics, trying to determine what pathogens it is we have there and what's causing those primary issues, because so many of the next steps are going to be defined by what is actually going on in the barn. You mentioned biosecurity.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Biosecurity is a great one to also think about because, ultimately, we want to try to keep all these diseases out, right, and that's what biosecurity is designed to do is to keep our pigs healthy and to keep them out. But then, on the flip side of that, we have a disease enter our barn and I think the thought process then becomes biocontainment. How do I keep this disease to this one site If I am going and doing chores at two other sites, or if I've got that site in a geographic area where there may be a lot of other pigs? In a geographic area where there may be a lot of other pigs, what do I need to do to keep that disease isolated to that one site and not risk the other sites that I may be taking care of, or maybe in the direct vicinity? And then finally, yeah, you mentioned treatment.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Right, we talked about the health of the pig driving so much of the profitability and the production of a system, of the profitability and the production of a system. Antibiotics are a wonderful tool to help respond to that bacterial challenge that may be present, and so identifying what route of administration, what treatment option and what antibiotic we need to use and getting it implemented quickly is really critical. And that's where products like we have available at Pharmgate Animal Health, such as Penn Chlor-64, pennox 343, can really be. Depending on the pathogen load that you're identifying, they can become a really nice tool for a producer or veterinarian.
Sarah Muirhead:You mentioned treatment options, so, as a veterinarian, what do you generally tend to recommend to producers? What should they think about?
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Yeah, I think that it's so easy to want to look for a silver bullet or a standard protocol, but so many of this is going to be case by case, and that's where I would refer back to kind of what we were just talking about is having a good health team in your corner where we can make the right decision and we can get the right molecule selected, where, if we do need a treatment, making sure that we get the right treatment administered the correct way and administered in a timely fashion becomes really critical.
Sarah Muirhead:So then, what common pathogens are these treatments labeled for?
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:When you think about so specific to the enteric side. You know, I think about the E coli we mentioned, pastorella both of those pathogens would be on the label indications for PennClor64 and PennOx343. And then each of those products would also have subtle differences in what pathogens they're labeled for as well. But really it can give you a nice coverage of a lot of different pathogens that you may be dealing with and if you need more information or if you'd like to learn more about those products, the Pharmgate website is a great resource.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:products the Pharmgate website is a great resource, Otherwise your Pharmgate team member that you work with can also provide you any information that you need on those products.
Sarah Muirhead:So when producers are looking for what's the best treatment option for their operation, what's your advice?
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:Yeah, I think so much of that is. Again, it's going to kind of depend on the case-by-case basis and what we're seeing, but I think that a couple of factors go into that and it goes back. It sounds like a broken record at this point, but I think that's where your health team, your veterinarian, can really help you sort through that, Because, first and foremost, it has to be the right medication for the pathogen that we're trying to treat. Diagnostics go a long way in helping us determine that how effectively and how quickly we need to respond to that. Medication can also play a role in terms of how am I going to administer this antibiotic.
Dr. Nic Lauterbach:At Pharmgate we've talked about Penclor 64 and Penox 343 being available through the water. We also have in-feed antibiotics and we offer injectable antibiotics as well, so we have a really robust portfolio to help manage through. You know, if you're having health challenges if you're, if you are dealing with these bacterial pathogens we routinely deal with in the in the swine industry, I believe that our company can be a resource for you and we can help work through those to really help you, your veterinarian, whomever that may be identify what treatment option is the best for that specific scenario.
Sarah Muirhead:Our thanks to Dr Nic Lauterbach for joining us here today. This episode has been brought to you by Pharmgate Animal Health, a growing business that puts livestock first. By Pharmgate Animal Health, a growing business that puts livestock first. Pharmgate offers a proven portfolio of technically supported, high-quality products that are the foundation of custom herd health protocols. By offering multiple options for active ingredients, concentrations and administration routes, Pharmgate provides you with choices to fit your needs and get you the results that you want. I'm Sarah Muirhead and you've been listening to Feedstuffs In Focus. If you would like to hear more conversations about some of the big issues affecting the livestock, poultry grain and animal feed industries, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast channel. Until next time, have a great day and thanks for listening.