Schultz Pigs

Ian Schultz, who has been farming pigs and kiwifruit for 30 years in the Bay of Plenty, is well placed to comment on his biosecurity worries around the PRRS pig disease issue. Ian is primarily a kiwifruit grower, although he has farmed pigs for slightly longer than he has grown kiwifruit.

Ian has a 140 sow unit, producing 50 baconer pigs a week. These are around 90kg liveweight, killing out to 65kg weights. He sells the baconer pigs to wholesaler and processor Wilson Hellaby in Auckland. It’s a straightforward and simple business, with 16 to 17 sows farrowing every three weeks.

Morepork Farm is 50ha altogether, and as well as the pigs has some plantation forestry, 3ha of avocadoes, some grazing for 10 beef cattle, 8ha of gold kiwifruit and 2.8ha of green kiwifruit. About 4-5ha are devoted solely to the pigs at the moment.

All the sows used to farrow outdoors, but for the last eight years Ian has been unable to get a premium for pork produced by outdoor sows. He has also expanded the orchard in this time, reducing the available outdoor area for the pigs. Now about half the sows are farrowed indoors, and half outdoors. Those indoors are put into farrowing crates just to have their piglets, which results in more piglets staying alive.

The outdoor piglets roam free while the sows are kept in paddocks by electric fences. The piglets go under the hotwire and when they are coming up to four weeks of age they become quite adventurous.

The mob of 150 odd piglets roam out into the orchard and keep the pruners entertained as they play among the kiwifruit vines. While the piglets are very happy in the field, there are much greater losses of pigs between farrowing and weaning. Lots of piglets get laid on by the sow just after farrowing. It is not uncommon to lose half the piglets born alive, especially during wet weather. On average we wean two more piglets per litter by farrowing inside.

The pigs are weaned into covered eco-barns, which are like plastic greenhouses, and are bedded down with straw and shavings to keep them dry.

Ian uses shavings, woodchips, shredded paper and in the season, dry kiwifruit fur and leaves as bedding for the pigs in the eco-barns.

When Ian first built the piggery 30 years ago he had only 50 sows, and built totally enclosed slatted floor sheds. He still uses these sheds to finish some of the pigs.

He has six eco-barns, two for dry sows, three for weaners and one for growing on the weaners. Many South Island pig farmers, if they have a ready source of straw, are moving to the roomier eco-barns.

The sows are artificially inseminated by Ian to a terminal sire which is a composite of Duroc, Hampshire and Large White. All the sows are Duroc, Large White and Landrace crosses.

Breeding companies supply the boar semen, back-up boars and breeding sows, as all the piglets born at Morepork Farm are marketed. “We don’t have a big enough base of sows to select from to justify keeping our own breeding sows,” Ian says.

As well as buying brought-in feed, Ian also mixes his own liquid feeds using dairy by-products, broll from the flour milling industry, maize, soy meal and reject kiwifruit.

As someone who has been farming pigs and growing kiwifruit for 30 years, he is well placed to comment on the major biosecurity issues facing both industries. His orchard is predominantly gold kiwifruit, and already 80% of the vines have been chainsawed off because of PSA. The few remaining “sick-looking” gold vines aren’t carrying a lot of fruit.

“I have been absolutely devastated by PSA which needn’t have come into the country.”

His gold kiwifruit will have to be grafted over to the new G3 variety which is being released later this year.

“The industry is currently thrashing out a mechanism to allow affordable access to budwood, so when this happens we hope to be able to graft the vines to the G3 variety.

PSA arrived in New Zealand in November 2010, probably in pollen or plant material that was not detected by MAF at the airport or wharves. It has destroyed the most profitable kiwifruit variety in our industry, and the cost is enormous.

We will lose 10 million trays of production this year, each worth $11-$12 FOBS (free on board ship) and another 20 million trays in the next two years as the disease spreads.

Orchards worth $350,000 a hectare two years ago are now being valued at less than $100,000 a hectare.

This could have been prevented if we had been more vigilant at our borders. MAF knew the disease was rampant in Italy, yet they permitted pollen to be imported from both Chile and China for use in our kiwifruit industry.

This pollen was not checked or tested for PSA. It was sprayed by contractors onto growers’ orchards without the grower being aware the pollen being used was imported from countries where the PSA and other disease risks had not been assessed. MAF considered the risk of introducing PSA associated with imported pollen to be minimal.

New Zealand piggeries are currently free of a disease called PRRS. Most countries have the disease and it is common in the pork that we import from Canada, USA and Europe. New Zealand keeps our pig herds free from the disease by requiring all imported pork to be cooked to kill the virus. MAF want to change the rules to allow fresh imported pork to be sold without treating it to kill the virus.

MAF are using the same argument about minimal risk to justify importing fresh pork containing PRRS. They accept that overseas feeding trials confirm that pigs contract PSA very readily when fed infected meat.

But they say that the risk of our herds getting the disease is low because pig farmers are not supposed to feed uncooked meat scraps to pigs. Thus they conclude that the risks of introducing PRRS are minimal. Just like they said about the risks of PSA being minimal.

MAF know very little about what happens in small backyard piggeries. They have no data on the number of them, what they are feeding, how they trade among themselves and where the pigs produced eventually go. How can they conduct a serious risk assessment without first knowing what is happening in the backyard pig industry?

The pig industry has already been through a major biosecurity problem back in 2003 when PMWS came into the country. This is post-weaning multi-systemic wasting syndrome, and although the disease poses no risk to humans, it has a significant impact on reproduction and growth in young pigs, and severe economic consequences for the industry. At the time there was no cure and no vaccine. When it arrived it devastated our weaners.

Fortunately a vaccine has since been developed, and it is reasonably effective at controlling PMWS.

I have seen what happens with PSA in kiwifruit and PMWS in pigs. I don’t want to have to go through it all over again. It is so destructive. We know the risks of PRRS, we know the damage it causes. Why would MAF want to put our industry at risk?

To date New Zealand has been free of a lot of diseases faced overseas. by farmers. We are still free of PRRS (Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome), and this is the one we want to keep out.

Since its initial detection in Canada nearly 20 years ago PRRS has swept through almost every pig-producing country in the world, except for New Zealand and Australia. They, including Sweden, which has apparently eradicated PRRS, are the only three countries which have maintained effective risk management strategies, including measures on pig meat entering the country.

MAF made the decision some time ago to allow fresh pork in, but the Pork Industry Board contested the decision, and delayed implementation. The industry is now waiting for the outcome of a High Court hearing.

MAF has been talking about opening up importation up, but it doesn’t make any sense at all.

The industry doesn’t have a terribly good image because it has received bad publicity from the dry sow issue, from historic effluent and environmental issues, and general public perceptions of intensive livestock farming. We are not valued by politicians and I think we are being traded off for increased trade access to US and European markets.

It’s part of New Zealand opening itself up to global markets, but one of the downsides is the damage to our industry.

The Australians are much more belligerent in terms of protecting their industry and their growers – with apples for example.

For us it’s not about preventing free trade, because 43% of the total consumption of pig meat in New Zealand is already imported.

We don’t mind if imported pig meat comes in, as long as it goes into the bacon and ham market where it is cooked. Opening up the market to fresh pork won’t make any difference to the volume of imports.

We want to make sure the meat is all cooked to kill the PRRS virus before it goes out to consumers.

As it is now an offence under the RMA to run 5-10 sows without a resource consent in the Bay of Plenty, those people who do have a few pigs keep a very low profile. Neither the district councils nor the regional councils are aware of these smaller operations.

I know of at least half a dozen operations with 8-10 sows each operating in the Bay but without being on the MAF database. MAF makes no attempt to enforce the existing regulations that make it illegal to feed uncooked food waste to pigs. They can put all the regulations they like about waste feeding and pig management in place, but unless they enforce them or show some concern about it, what is the use?

We are very aware that there are large numbers of backyard pig farmers who are feeding uncooked food waste to pigs. We know that most restaurants and institutions have “pig buckets” that are cleared by these small scale farmers.

There are scientific experiments that show that feeding uncooked imported pig meat (infected with PRRS) to uninfected pigs transmits the disease in 100% of cases. It is very contagious and we know for sure eventually some of our pigs will get PRRS. Once one herd is infected it will spread rapidly to other herds. The South African outbreak in 2004 showed how contagious the disease can be.

We have to pay more attention to looking after things that make New Zealand profitable for producing food. This includes being free of the diseases that are devastating other countries.

We have a relatively disease free, high-health, environmentally sound farming system in New Zealand. When we start trading that off or sacrificing that at the altar of free trade, we are giving away the very things that make us competitive to start with. It’s a really short-sighted policy. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.

New Zealand as a whole has to put more value on our freedom from these diseases. For example potato growers have been devastated by pysllid, and beekeepers by varroa mite. There have been numerous breaches of biosecurity recently such as the Warehouse strawberry kit debacle.

One of the biggest single risks to New Zealand’s agriculture industry is foot and mouth disease, and the main vector for transmissions has been proved to be piggeries. Although pigs don’t get affected as badly as sheep and cattle, the disease is spread very quickly by pigs. Foot and mouth disease is often introduced by feeding uncooked meat to pigs.

If that disease came into New Zealand, then the spread could be very rapid through backyard piggeries, and the cost of that to our economy would be just enormous. MAF are not doing their job of enforcing the waste feeding regulations.

Beef farmers should also be concerned about these issues. As kiwifruit growers, we thought MAF had the PSA issue under control, but in hindsight we should have been more active ourselves as an industry about the potential for PSA from Italy coming here.”