The Pipestone (MN) Veterinary Clinic has designed its biosecurity programs around keeping out one disease — porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

When Joel Nerem, DVM, was hired by the Pipestone Veterinary Clinic a year ago, he was asked to join six swine-exclusive veterinarians who service 42 sow farms across the Midwest.

Nerem was brought in to help upgrade the health management services that the southwest Minnesota clinic provides for the 120,000-sow Pipestone System.

“Besides servicing approximately 12 sow farms in the Pipestone System, my other role is to coordinate a lot of the health plans that we are doing to make them a little bit more uniform and systematic,” he explains.

“We are applying the best management practices in production, and also creating a more systematic approach to biosecurity for all of the farms that are part of the Pipestone System,” he says.

Nerem is the point person to coordinate biosecurity practices for the growing production system that stretches from Minnesota and South Dakota, down through Nebraska and Iowa, plus one multiplier sow farm in Wisconsin.

The Pipestone Veterinary Clinic provides production management and supervision as well as health services to the sow farms. In turn, the group of small, independent, sow farm owners receive 17- to 20-day-old weaned pigs to finish at their farms.

Biosecurity Challenges

Nerem says the diversity of the production systems presents obvious biosecurity challenges. “You are delivering pigs every week to independent producers with varying health statuses at their farms, and you have to go back into those sow units a couple times a week to get pigs out again, so those activities present a challenge.”

Pipestone swine veterinarians perform regular herd health visits, but biosecurity efforts can easily fall through the cracks as attention is focused on improving production performance, or addressing health challenges, he points out.

“We have a commitment to all of our shareholders to implement the best practices as we understand them for biosecurity. We view that as what is good for ‘this’ farm is good for ‘that’ farm, so that is our approach to making it more systematic across the different sow farms,” Nerem says.

Biosecurity Audits

When it comes to biosecurity, most producers know what needs to be done, but sometimes practices need to be tweaked and producers need to be reminded, Nerem stresses.

That's where Hannah Walkes comes in. The young woman was hired in 2006 as health services technician to focus on streamlining biosecurity practices at the Pipestone System sow farms.

One of her main duties is to conduct biosecurity audits at the sow farms each quarter. “I do random, unannounced biosecurity audits just to make sure people are implementing the techniques that they are supposed to be practicing,” she relates.

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