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Mind the sign, pleads hog producer
A farrow-to-finish hog producer in northeast Missouri is urging everyone to heed biosecurity signs at livestock operations such as hers.
Chris Chinn tells Brownfield it’s about disease prevention for their pigs. She says they’re especially trying to keep the highly contagious Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) – which does NOT harm humans but is deadly to baby pigs – away from their farm, “When you are visiting a livestock farm and you see a sign like that you need to observe it. It’s really not for your protection but it’s for the protection and the livestock that’s being raised on that farm.”
She recently chased down a driver who came all the way up to their barns, explaining that the biosecurity stop-sign is to protect her families’ hog operations,“They felt like they really weren’t causing any harm by just driving around looking for us up in that direction of our farm. And, I explained to them what that sign meant and about the PED virus that’s currently going around. They were very apologetic. They just really simply didn’t realize that the sign meant them.”
Chinn says a lot of finishers in their area have PEDv in their herds: The Maschoffs west of them in Macon County and Cargill, to the east of them in Marion County, Missouri. There is NO vaccine for PEDv which easily spreads and can knock out four to five weeks of production when it hits.
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