Nutrition, technology and management are little more than window dressing on a farm that does not have high standards of health within its herds, say various delegates attending the 2023 Banff Pork Seminar. 
Prairie Hog Country spent some time behind the scenes at BPS 2023, held during the second week in January, chatting with various industry participants who had come from across the continent to take in the seminars and mingle with others. 
Among those delegates was a group of four, sponsored by synBios, an animal-production supplier based in Querétaro, Mexico. 
Health status is the most important challenge facing hog production in Mexico, said Arturo Urbieta, Business Unit Director, Swine and Aquaculture for the company. Accompanying Urbieta on his fifth journey to BPS were synBios Director General Arturo Gallegos and swine producers Juan Hernández and Roberto Sarmiento. 
“We have a lot of health challenges, which make us not too competitive compared to what I have heard in the seminar. Canadian standards are much better than Mexican,” said Urbieta. 
“When we don’t have health, all the management and all the technology and all the nutrition recommendations goes to nothing.” 
Of the three pork producing states in Mexico, Jalisco is the biggest and it is also the state with the most severe health challenges, he said. 
“Almost all the diseases are in there, in all the barns. They have continuous PRRS (porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome) outbreaks and continuous PED (porcine epidemic diarrhea) outbreaks, and they account for a very important percentage of the Mexican market. 
“There are a few producers in Jalisco that have all the new farms that are being built at around 10,000 sows each. But the old farms, which is the majority of production, should be around 2,000 to 3,000 sows.” 
Urbieta explained that the number of sows in Mexico has remained stable, but those herds are producing more protein per sow with consolidation among some of the larger production companies, including Keken, which has about 100,000 sows throughout its operation. 
Keken and others have been building new barns in different regions of Sonora and Yucatan for a fresh start, seeking improved technology, nutrition and management strategies to support their efforts at raising health standards. 
Mexico exports into the same markets as Canada and has an efficient and highly competitive processing sector serving those exports as well as domestic consumers, he said. The quest for higher health status and improved production efficiencies is therefore a necessary response to the investment in exporting pork. 
Because of the importance placed on exports, Mexico has been developing an African Swine Fever protocol to keep the virus out of the country and contain any break if necessary. 
“If we get ASF, of course, all the exports should be shut down unless the government continues in the compartmentalization and regionalization strategy,” said Urbieta. 
“The alerts on biosecurity standards have been rising a lot since the ASF alert (on Hispaniola). One way to address or prevent is to strengthen biosecurity. The other is to cooperate with the Mexican authorities and identify the possible risk and events and work in hand with the Mexican authorities through all the processes and recommendations for prevention. 
“We think we can do a very good job in compartmentalization and regionalization. However, it’s the customer’s call to see if that is enough and sufficient to continue exporting to other countries.” 
Urbieta encourages Canadian producers to value their exceptional health status and continue improving operations with large-scale technology, genetics and other variables that increase productivity. 
In all operations, keeping foreign animal disease out of the country is “Job One, Job Two and Job Three,” said Red Deer-based veterinarian Egan Brockhoff, veterinary counsellor to the Canadian Pork Council and a lecturer at the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. 
Representatives from Canada, US and Mexico meet regularly to refine strategies to keep ASF off the continent, especially since the outbreak on Hispaniola, including Puerto Rico, Haiti and Dominican Republic early in 2022. 

“There is a lot of anxiety because of the virus’s presence in the Caribbean now,” said Brockhoff. The primary mode of transport is likely the illegal movement of meat off the island and into non-infected regions of the Caribbean and North, Central and South America. 
“It speaks to the importance of robust disease surveillance and the importance that all of the pork producing nations within the Caribbean, South America and Central America have the capacity to do surveillance. That’s critical,” he said. 
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) are heavily invested in helping neighbouring nations perform surveillance to ensure early detection of ASF. 
“There is no such thing as zero risk, but Canada is pretty darn exciting for low risk.” 
Brockhoff had presented Canada’s surveillance system earlier in the week to colleagues from Mexico, stressing factors including surveillance and world-class testing facilities while discussing the critical importance of biosecurity. 
“We have always two goals: Early detection, contain it while it’s tiny so we can crush it out and then we can get back to normal business,” said Brockhoff. 
“The second is proof of absence. Canada is a very high health country with multiple species, so we’re free of a lot of those diseases and so we have to demonstrate to our trading partners that, yes, we are free. And so, we’ve always got those two big goals in front of us.” 
While ASF is front of mind across the continent, other viruses are still creating problems on Canadian farms, including PRRS, PED and porcine circovirus Type 1 and Type 2, he said. 
“We have a national biosecurity standard here in Canada that the Canadian Pork Council has updated again, working with the provincial pork organizations and veterinarians across the country. 
“I feel like we talk about biosecurity so much that people are tired of talking about it, but those commonsense things of single sourcing your pigs; not mixing; all-in, all-out; age stratification; segregation – those principles of biosecurity (are) never going to change. 
“As tired as I think we get some days about talking about biosecurity, it’s still something we have to do every day.” 
Looking at PRRS as an example, Brockhoff stated that it takes six to nine months for a barn to return to normal production following a break and months more to totally eliminate those pathogens. 
While vaccines have been developed to help manage circovirus, there is still no effective vaccine for PRRS and, in the Americas, vaccination is not an option for blocking ASF, he said. 
A vaccine was developed by the USDA and licensed to a commercial lab in Vietnam, with some of the early issues now being corrected. However, while the ASF vaccine may be useful in preserving the protein supply within regions where the virus has appeared, it is not an option for keeping the disease itself from entering a population, said Brockhoff. 
“Those are countries that are likely going to say, ‘We can’t eliminate the disease. We’re going to live with it as an endemic disease, but we want to make sure that the pigs born here, raised here can get to market.’ 
“That’s the foundational principle of that vaccine and really all the vaccines that are being trialed around the world right now are all about that.” 
Canada’s first goal in the case of an ASF break would be to try containing and eradicating the disease, starting from Level Zero where there is no disease in the country. 
“The vaccine doesn’t necessarily help us with any of those steps,” said Brockhoff 
“To get to a place where we would even consider ASF vaccination as a tool in this country we will have had to get to a place where the virus has overrun all of North America, it’s endemic in all of our pig populations and we can’t stop it.” 
University of Alberta Associate Professor Michael Dyck, one of two program directors for BPS, said he is revisiting embryo transfer as a means of moving genetics safely to prevent the spread of disease. 
“I did some work 20 years ago on that. During my PhD, a lot of my work was on genetic manipulation of animals, a lot of embryo manipulation and embryo transfer. That’s more biomedical research. From a livestock production point of view, it is making sense to invest in this,” he said. 
The hurdles to using embryo transfer in swine are the large and complex reproductive tract along with the larger number of embryos to be flushed from individual animals. Those logistical hurdles had prevented advances in embryo transfer research in swine, said Dyck. But there is renewed interest now as a means of preventing the transfer of disease. 
“Artificial insemination works, it’s very efficient in disseminating genetics and getting new genetics into populations and that sort of thing, but it’s only half the genetics,” he said. 
“If you want to make immediate change in the population, the easiest way is to bring in animals. As soon as you bring in animals you bring in disease. So that’s where people are looking at embryos . . . as a good way of transporting an entire genome in a biosecure way, bringing it into a new country, introducing it into recipient animals.” 
Brockhoff expressed some reservations about whether embryo transfer would be a secure means of shipping genetics, citing new research from Germany indicating that ASF can be transferred in semen. 
Embryo transfer has been a cornerstone of genetic improvement in the beef and dairy sectors, but swine production has a different model and embryo transfer has not been a part of that, he said. 
There may be some light at the end of the tunnel in terms of gene editing and researchers are looking for markers that will be able to show whether an animal has had the disease, the vaccine, or both. But that work is still in its early days, said Brockhoff. 
Canada and the US have a tightly integrated industry and Canada is an export-driven nation. 
“So vaccination, for sure, just like the presence of the disease, potentially prevents export, full stop,” he said. 
Steve Weiss, founder and president of Iowa-based NutriQuest, said Canada had a distinct advantage in the pursuit of high-health herds, through its focus on biosecurity, geography and hog density. 
Urbieta said it’s a system that Mexico has been watching closely as it steps up its efforts to improve health standards and production efficiency. •
— By Brenda Kossowan