What is holding back the development of the pig farming industry?

Management that "sees only the trees but not the forest"
Although the concept of prevention being more important than treatment has always been advocated, few pig farms actually put it into practice. In the process of raising pigs, pig farm managers often "see only the trees but not the forest": suppose this pig farm raises 10,000 pigs, and in one row of pig houses, 100 pigs show symptoms of disease. The raisers, and even the managers, then focus all their main energy on this one row of pigs, wondering what disease this is, how it can be cured, taking the sick pigs everywhere for testing... And what about the pigs in the other 99 rows of pig houses? They are almost completely ignored, just fed as usual.

Cheng Jianguo suggests that when a sick pig is found, it should first be isolated, and whether it is worth treating should be assessed. If it falls into the following 5 situations, it is best to cull it directly: incurable, high treatment cost, treatment that costs a lot of time and labor, low economic value after recovery, and strong contagiousness. Second, if it is worth treating and is a chronic disease, provide the pig with more comfortable living conditions than in normal pig houses, such as house temperature, water temperature, feed and so on. The most important point is to ensure that healthy pigs are not infected.

Only by being "pig-centered" and making pigs feel comfortable can you raise healthy pigs, and only then can the pigs create greater benefits for you.

Excessive and indiscriminate use of vaccines
Many pig farms cannot formulate a reasonable immunization program according to their own farm's situation. Almost from birth to slaughter, vaccines are given every few days, seriously affecting the health of the pigs. Huge demand has attracted world-famous biopharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Bayer, which all regard China as an important sales market, and their sales volumes are all very large; at the same time, domestic vaccine manufacturers have also increased day by day. In the 1980s, each province had only one or two veterinary drug and vaccine companies, but now one province has several vaccine manufacturers, with more and more types of vaccines and increasingly large output. In recent years, the state has invested a large amount of financial and human resources to study various pig diseases, but now it seems that this has actually caused the greatest harm to pig farms. Demand drives production, and production in turn drives demand, causing one vaccine and another vaccine in the pig's body to interact with each other, so that physical condition does not rise but falls.

Cheng Jianguo believes that pigs simply do not need so many injections, and that injecting more costs money, takes effort, and yields low benefits. He suggests that each pig farm should formulate a reasonable epidemic prevention program according to its own actual situation. For pigs, in addition to swine fever, the vaccines that must be injected also include 4 kinds: porcine parvovirus, pseudorabies, Japanese encephalitis, and foot-and-mouth disease, which must also be vaccinated. Others should be determined according to the actual situation of the farm.

The channels for pig farming technical services are not smooth
Large-scale pig farms have their own technicians and expert service teams, but where do small and medium-sized pig farms get their technical services? At present, mainly from veterinary drug and feed sales personnel. The health care plans, feed, additives and so on that these people recommend to pig farms clearly have an obvious profit-seeking nature. This is unavoidable, and at the same time it is also very dangerous. The managers and raisers of breeding farms can improve their own level through study, but no matter how high their level is, it is impossible for them to reach the level of professional veterinarians, so the epidemic prevention and health care plans of many small and medium-sized pig farms are helplessly led by the nose by certain manufacturers. Some domestic veterinary drug manufacturers provide breeding farms (households) with health care plans in which they take this medicine today and that medicine tomorrow. From birth to sale, it is simply not growing up by eating feed, but growing up by taking medicine. This is a regression in pig farming technology.

The reason why small and medium-sized pig farms need scientific pig farming methods and management methods is that we have now introduced a large number of foreign breeds such as Large White, Landrace, and Duroc, while native pigs are becoming fewer and fewer. Breeding farms (households) still use native methods to raise foreign pigs, so it is very difficult to raise them well. They need to learn management methods, production models, and advanced technologies suitable for foreign pigs.

Cheng Jianguo believes that to change this situation, in addition to the relevant personnel at pig farms actively learning, grassroots veterinary stations should also shoulder their own responsibilities and regularly provide relevant training to breeding farms (households). Whether inviting experts from scientific research departments or frontline veterinary workers, in short, they should provide breeding farms (households) with scientific breeding and management technology to help them raise good pigs.



|||Thank you, Teacher Cheng, for your selfless sharing. I have learned a lot.