News

Prices good for producers unless PEDv hits

While the price picture looks very good for U.S. pork producers as a whole it won’t be for those whose pigs get the PED virus. Howard Hill raises hogs in Iowa and is the new president of the National Pork Producers Council, “When we look at the price you’d think everybody’s going to be making money but, unfortunately, we’re going to have producers that are going to be hurting because they have no pigs to sell because they’ve had PED and this disease causes almost 100% mortality in sucking pigs. So, those that don’t have pigs are going to be very unhappy even though the price is good.”

Dr. Craig Rowels, an Iowa producer, tells Brownfield Ag News his operation was hit with PEDv and is now in the recovery phase. The financial loss, he says, is huge but it goes beyond that.  Rowels says, “We lost the equivalent of about three weeks’ worth of production that just couldn’t make it and the losses of neonatal pigs is a financial loss but it’s also an emotional loss for the people that have to work with those animals every day.” Rowels is one of those people. He says he has highly increased bio-security measures in his hog operations.