I'm Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired. -- Fannie Lou Hamer

PEDv.   A bunch of letters, that by themselves are seemingly as innocent and nonthreatening as letters could be, but together, they form the abbreviation for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus.  Now, if you haven't heard about it yet, you've either been living under a rock, or are genuinely one of these non-tech folks that don't own a television, computer, smart phone, or any other 'new-fangled gadget'.  Chances are however that you have heard about it, and probably either have a lot of questions, or have heard some misinformation.  Here's what you should know:

Q: What is PEDv?
A:  PEDv is a Type 1 Coronavirus, which means it's part of the coronavirus families known to often affect humans, pigs, dogs and cats.

Q: Can I catch it?  Can my dog catch it?  Can my cat catch it?
A:  No.  Tests by epidemiologists (fancy talk for disease-spread-experts) have indicated that this virus is not zoonotic (fancy talk for loving to infect a bunch of different species) in nature.

Q: Where did it come from?
A:  PEDv is not new.  PEDv has been around for over 40 years.  It was first identified in Europe in the 1970's, but the strain they had was relatively mild.  They wrestled with it all the way through the 1990's.  By the late 1980's, it had spread to Asia, and during that period, morphed into a strand of the virus which was imported by the USDA's National Veterinary Services Laboratory.  The idea was that they could research it, and develop a series of safeguards and possibly a vaccine should it ever make it to the United States.  The US also began to prohibit the importation of pork and swine from countries known to have diseases, in hopes of preventing them from coming here.  The US virus is 99.4% similar to the Asian version.

Q: Then why aren't we better prepared if we've had it this long?
A:  PEDv is very hard to culture.  It thrives in piggy guts, but in a lab, not so much.  USDA-NVSL successfully managed to get it to grow, but when you've got diseases already here like TGE (Transmissible Gastro-Enteritis) and PRRS (Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome), killing pigs in the moment, it's understandable that a disease that wasn't here would be put on the back burner.

Q: But is here now?  Where?
A:  PEDv has been detected in 25 states, Canada, Mexico and Peru.  I have a partial list, but no one it seems has compiled a list of where these farms are located.  It may be out of concern for safety for the producers, but it may also be due to the isolationist approach to vaccine/test/treatment development that often comes in the face of outbreaks such as this.  Universities and pharmaceutical companies will keep their research close to breast to protect their work until they can patent and then distribute.  The list I have so far, which is INCOMPLETE and will add to as I get information is:

Colorado
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
North Carolina
Ohio
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Texas
Wisconsin

Q:  What does PEDv do?
A:  Inside a pig's gut are these little grassy fingers called villi.  They sort of grab all the moisture and nutrients the body needs to survive and be healthy. PEDv is like a lawn mower, set on medium low setting.  It mows over them, so they can't do their job.  TGE is kind of like a lawnmower on ultra low setting.  It gouges your lawn.  PEDV just cuts it to 'putting green' length.  As a result, pigs get watery diarrhea and vomiting.  For full grown pigs, this is hard on their system, but they usually have fat stores and can weather through it with supportive care, such as fluids with electrolytes and good quality feeds.  Piglets, however, don't have any fat.  Every calorie they ingest goes immediately to growth, and so it's almost always 100% fatal to litters.

Q: How will this affect me?
A:  Now that's the billion dollar question.  $1.8 billion dollars in income to be exact.  Pork is the number 1 consumed meat in the world, with people consuming more than 100 million metric tons of it.  The United States is the third largest producer of pork, behind China (1st) and the European Union (2nd).  The United States pork exports are over $6.3 billion dollars, and for every $1 billion dollars exported, it supports approximately 17,200 jobs.  Our pork exports account for $10.6 billion dollars in agricultural output.  All in all, this is a big deal, as producers across the country are having to face the very real possibility of bankruptcy.  Governors of Midwestern states are even discussing the possibility of declaring States of Emergency, and are pushing for the allocation of Disaster Relief funds.  Naturally, it's not unreasonable to expect pork prices to sky rocket in the coming year, with next year's pork essentially dying at birth.

Q: What can I do?
A: Well, there are several things you can do.

As a consumer -- You can understand that while this is a crisis, pork is SAFE TO EAT.  You cannot catch it, and you cannot spread it by eating it.  Please don't stop buying pork.  Also, if you are keen on local foods, don't insist on visiting farms, and if you do want to visit where your food is being purchased from, visit only 1 farm.  Don't 'farm-hop'.  Even if you change your shoes, shower, etc., the dirt carried on your tires from farm to farm is enough to spread it, and ruin your sources.

As a swine enthusiast and competitor -- Consider this year buying in-state, especially if your state does not yet have PEDv.  Buy from a single source.  Don't 'farm-hop'.  We all can appreciate competition and know that buying the best increases your odds of winning, but winning really, honestly, isn't everything.  Consider not participating in non-terminal shows, like county shows, and purebred events.  Shows and functions where your pig is around other pigs is just an accident waiting to happen, as the virus piggy backs its way to your farm.  Avoid auctions, livestock shows and events. Practice solid BioSecurity Protocol.  Limit farm visitors.  Source local feeds that are free from pork meals and proteins.  Require people to wear PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) gear, and to use disinfectant foot baths, and if they refuse, don't let them on your property.  Encourage your State Extension offices to reconsider non-terminal shows, and communal tagging events.  Understand that even if your pig had it as a juvenile and survived, there's a good chance they will never grow fast enough to make weight.  Do not purchase from farms that have had or suspect they have PEDv.

As a swine producer -- BioSecurity, BioSecurity, BioSecurity.  Swine-ID protocols, travel logs, good medical records, and good observational records.  If we all keep our heads down, and hold out long enough, we might be able to weather this storm long enough until a vaccine is developed.

PEDv is a terrifying and harsh virus that isn't going away any time soon.  We all need to support our peers in their efforts to strengthen their BioSecurity practices, and do our best to stave the spread of this terrible disease.   I'd like to thank Dr. David Farnum from True North Technologies (http://goinshowin.com/trueglo.html), Dr. Sherri Clark of Virginia Tech's Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences (http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/org/dlacs/), Bryn Poliska-Jennson with the National Pork Board (http://www.pork.org), and Dr. Barrett Slenning with the North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Population Health and Pathobiology (http://www.cvm.ncsu.edu/dphp/).

Chick-a-boom, Chick-a-boom, Chick-a-boom

That is the sound a one legged chicken makes when they're scooting across your living room floor.  So, during the crazy Polar Vortex (which many of you might not have heard of since practically NO ONE heard when the derecho hit WV, but seemingly everyone heard when some half-wits in Charleston didn't want to poop in yellow water...)  we tried everything to keep our chickens warm.  I mean, normally we don't get temperatures this low during the winter.

We had heat lamps, trough heaters, copious amounts of bedding, and tar paper stapled to the walls of the buildings, in every effort to insulate from the howling winds that were dropping the wind chills into the negatives.  And, for the most part, we came out of it ok.  It was several weeks that passed before the kids commented the one of the chickens was acting 'broody'.  I thought it peculiar because she wasn't laying.

Upon closer inspection, she wasn't able to flex one of her feet, and her legs were very warm to the touch.  We brought her home, gave her a bath since she had a poopy butt, and set her in a little cardboard box to hang out while we tried to figure out what was going on with her.

We, of course, turned to the Pet Chicken Owners of Virginia Facebook group for answers.  These guys (also found online at http://www.petchickensofvirginia.com) are a wonderful wealth of information.  Fanciers across Virginia with way more experience when it comes to these feathered fellows are on there almost as much as I am, reading, answering questions, sharing pictures and jokes, and even a few good deals.  They organize swaps across the state, and all in all, a great group of people to be associated with.

The first concern everyone had was Marek's, but thankfully that wasn't it.  Someone thought maybe a sprain.  After a few days of her not improving, we consulted a veterinarian.  Dr. Willis is probably one of the most tolerant veterinarians out there.  It is a very rare occasion when he will take any sort of payment for a kid's animal or advice, and that's really appreciated when it comes to livestock.  He felt that there was a good chance she had frostbite!

After a week or so, the pad of her bad foot turned hard and black. Just the pad though, the legs were in good shape.  The veterinarian felt she'd make a full recovery, just needed time.  In the meantime, Gladys as she came to be known made herself right at home.

She had improved, and enjoys daily treats of scrambled eggs (which still gives me the heebiejeebies), oatmeal, and chopped fruit.  She makes an utter mess, which results in daily Dust Buster use, but she seems to enjoy being inside.

Not far from her, in two incubators, we have eggs slowly being rotated by automatic turners, in hopes that in just a couple more weeks, we'll have some fuzzies to join her.  Cross your fingers!!!

"There are two types of vegetarians...Those that have beef with chicken, and those who are too chicken to have beef."

That is a quote by Mokokoma Mokhonoana, one of my favorite authors who hails from South Africa.  He's a brilliant satirist, with a wickedly sharp wit.  I recommend my readers check out his website at http://www.mokokoma.com for a laugh, and some interesting reading that will definately make you rethink the human equation.

As some of you may have read in my previous post, and as many of you have inquired, my father was involved in a terrible bovine-attack.  Many people have images of sharks,

bears,

lions

 and tigers when they envision a crazed attack on a human being.  In fact, this is what happens when a tiger catches you and has their way with you...

Pretty freaking terrifying.  But no one thinks of cattle as being one of the most vicious, vile, vindictive, and a bunch of other v-words animals on the planet.  My dad is like most people.  He thinks of all of his cows as being friendly, simplistic creatures.  You know, sort of like that 'special' cousin everyone has, that's not really quite right.  It dawns on you that they're different usually around the holidays when they're caught licking the ornaments on the tree...

Well, dad had one cow in particular that was a difficult cow. She had a hard life before coming to the farm.  Her feet weren't quite right, and they would curl and require veterinary care every 6 months with corrective trimming just so she could hobble to and from the trough.  We called her 'Sore Feet'.  She was always the last cow into the chute, and the last one to the hay bale.  Cold weather was the worst on her, and the biggest fear was that one day she'd lay down and we wouldn't be able to get her back up.  A down cow is a dead cow.

Every year, Dad takes a cow to be butchered.  One of the perks of living on a farm is, of course, some of the best meat on the planet.  He encouraged 'Sore Feet' to the trailer, and everything seemed to be going really well.  She was keen on the snackage, and everyone was thinking that this was going to be a cake walk.  That's usually when things go catastrophically wrong, and this was no exception.

'Sore Feet' suddenly looked around, and realized she was the ONLY COW getting into the trailer.  In what was seconds, but seemed like minutes, her eyes connected with dad's, and she read his mind.  I neglected to inform you that cattle are really super-alien-creatures with telepathic capabilities... In his mind, she saw steaks, burgers, and roasts... and what happened next is a mixture of miracle and armageddon.

She turned towards my dad, stood up on her sore back feet, and punched the snot out of dad.  Then, once she had him down on the ground, she jumped on him like a trampoline.  Up and down, up and down, reminiscent of the bear jumping up and down on John Candy in the Great Outdoors.  Cow: 1 - Dad: 0

Then, she took off across the field, prancing like a new calf.  Should have named her Twinkle Toes.  She acted like there was nothing wrong with her feet, mooing like a nutjob all over the field.  Dad came inside and his arm was all swollen.  He was covered in bruises.  He couldn't twist his wrist, and we all told him he needed to go to the doctor because we suspected he had a fracture.  He refused.  Instead, he went back down there, where Twinkle Toes had apparently had a change of heart. She felt bad. She went right into the trailer without nary a peep.  Dad then subsequently shot her. *facepalm*  At least he waited until she got into the trailer.  Cow: 1 - Dad: 1

Sad part was, the neighbor's bull got in with her apparently, and she was almost full term with calf.  Cow: 2 - Dad: 1

Dad tried to baby his arm, but it wasn't long before he was out there, feeding the cattle.  He slipped on some ice, landed on it, and what was a fracture became a full blown break.  Being the insane-ex-navy-guy that he is, he set it in the field, and drove home before heading to the doctor's.  End result, surgical placement of a steel plate in his arm.  Cow: 3 - Dad: 1

Shortly thereafter, my Aunt Cindy asked me what sort of shape the cow was in.  I informed her that she was roughly steak shape...

What lessons can be learned from this?  Well, first of all, cattle are not stupid ruminants.  They are incredibly intelligent hell-beasts.  Secondly, the minute something seems to be going exactly to plan, expect total and complete chaos to ensue.  Thirdly, nothing good ever comes easy, and I guess fourth-ly . o (Is that a word?)  is that don't shoot the cow unless you're 100% sure she's not going to calve.

At least she tastes good.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Time has not been good to us here at Honey Bee Hill Performance.  I'm sorry for the long period between posts but a lot has been going on, and sad to say, a lot of it has been less than ideal.  We'll start with the good, and see where it goes from there...

Over New Years, my brother decided we were going to butcher and scrape our first hog.  We've never done it before.  We've read about it in books like Foxfire and Henry Stephens Book of the Farm, but the actual practice had thus far eluded us.  

He picked a smaller pig from our July litter, because they were going to do a pig roast for the New Years Eve party.  He never really did grow that well after he had been stepped on, but he was big enough to feed a few folks.

I will say that this was probably the shaggiest, hairiest litter I have EVER SEEN.  He had probably 3 inches of coat on him.  THICK hair.  For those of you who know us, you can see dad here is in fine shape.  This is pre-bovine-attack.

So, we knew the theory was to pour boiling water over the pig.  Why pour? Well, we also knew from our reading that prolonged exposure to boiling water would actually do the opposite of loosen the hair, and would go so far as to set it to where we couldn't get it off, and we were very afraid of that.

So, Mo thought the best way to do this was hanging the pig up.  Remember, first time.  He had purchased these bell scrapers for the job, and we were heating water on a turkey fryer.  For those wanting to do this, I recommend a much larger vessel for heating water.

The steam made it hard to see, and the odor was less than pleasant.  Wherever the boiling water landed, the hair did loosen, but as it cooled going down the pig, there was a lot of wasted water we felt.

We did as much of it as we could with it hanging, but it kept wanting to slide loose, which didn't help matters.  Scraping was hard too.

Then we got smart, and put it on a table. The water was able to cover a greater area at that point, and we found that scraping was MUCH easier.

This is the pig almost finished.  They then gutted him and torched what little fuzzies were left on his feet.

The finished pig in the back seat of my brother's car enroute to the New Years party. 

Now for the bad...

As many of you are aware, our crossbred sow that we were counting on for a litter for the kids did not take when bred to what was a sterile boar.  She was hormonally crazed, and was jumping our purebred hereford gilt that was bred to Hershel from Shipley Swine.  The purebred hereford did take. However, the sow which was twice her size roughed her up so bad that the placenta detached, and the hereford litter was in essence aborted...  So no purebreds.

It gets worse.

The ugly. You know that 'guaranteed bred' sow we drove all the way to Missouri to purchase?  Well, turns out the guy only used the word 'guaranteed' because he didn't actually think anything was wrong, and he didn't mean it.  So when she wasn't bred, we didn't get any of our money back, and he actually wanted us to keep paying on her.  His reasoning was that in purebreds, the litter is worth only 40 percent of the asking price.  But, this wasn't purebred, and more importantly, I bought the sow for the litter, so to me, that litter was 100 percent the asking price.  One thing led to another, and he wanted us to have her butchered and send him the meat, which of course, when you have 1600 dollars invested in a pig that isn't putting out any piglets, you're not going to send the guy meat.  As a woman with fertility problems, the sheer idea of killing an animal without first seeing WHY they're not producing hormones is abhorrent.  Could it be that she was 60+ pounds underweight with ribs showing and two giant abscesses on her back legs that had blown out with raging infections... maybe?  Just maybe?  

Anyway, infections are cleared up and we've got 40 pounds on her. You can still see ribs, but she is improving.  Urine is being tested to see what is going on with her hormones, and if she can be salvaged.  The guy asked if we got her to cycle would we send him more money for her, and Kevin asked the guy, "And if she doesn't, are you going to give us a refund?"  The guy said no, so Kevin said no.  Kevin asked him, "You have to ask yourself. What's your guarantee worth.  A guarantee is your word.  What's your WORD worth?"  

The guy tried to put it in automotive terms, like it somehow would make things better.  He said if you got a loan on a car, and wrecked the car, you're still responsible for paying for the car, and that's true.  But Kevin pointed out that you typically have insurance on said vehicle, which is your GUARANTEE that the vehicle will be paid for if something happens to it.  Then the guy tried to criticize Kevin for coming all the way to Missouri, but I pointed out the message log between the fellow and myself.  When he first told me how much he wanted, I backed out and said that it was too rich for my blood.  The guy came after me and said she'd be a good investment and would do payments and encouraged me to consider it, knowing full well where we were from and our reluctance to make that kind of investment in a hog.  Anyway, end result... we have a pig with no babies, 2 tons of gestation and lactation feed with no litters on the ground, and our budget for the year absolutely fubar.

I don't think the guy meant for any of this to happen.  I just think he's a really really poor businessman, who doesn't even own a 250 dollar ultrasound machine, who probably needs to improve the conditions his animals are kept in.  I also think it was partially my fault for not demanding to see good pictures of the sow before we traveled 1800 miles on the word of someone I did not know personally.  When we have crap happen in our business, we have to eat it, because it's not our customer's fault.  It may not be our fault either, but that's the risk you take when you're in business.  A guarantee is your word.  What's your word worth?

I will say that perhaps the bright side to all of this is that we have had a wonderful group of people come together to make sure our children will have good, competitive pigs to show.  I want to let this be a shout out to some true gems in this industry, who really do make it all about the kids.  

To Surface Showpigs -- Thank you for holding our hand through this entire experience, and for helping Tiffany and Levi have some animals to show.  This guy is a real hero when it comes to kids in 4-H.  His willingness to work with the kids is just beyond compare, and he's a true example of someone who's not in it for the money.

To Travis Meyerholtz -- Thanks a million for helping us with the craziness of inducing and all that entailed, and for hooking us up with K and T showpigs.  

To LG Genetics -- Thanks for answering my million questions and your support.  

To Heather and Lee Helvey -- Thank you so much for just being there, crossing your fingers, cheering and commiserating when things didn't go the way we had hoped.

To Mark and Kambe Mabry -- You guys are great. Will be crossing our fingers for May pigs out of Outreach, and hope to get some Hamps next year from you all.

To Rickey Heavilin -- You're a saint, and thanks for your support and help.  We appreciate it so much.

To Clesie Hines Davidson -- For making me realize I'm not alone in my suffering.  Friends bonded in misery and hope for the future. :)

And Lisa Brooks and Edith Wade -- For letting me vent, and giving me good tips for the future.

If I've missed anyone, I'm sorry.  It's times like this when you are able to look around after the dust settles and see the gems shining for who they are.  Sometimes, I think that the only way to learn these lessons is the hard way.  Here's hoping that Fall of 2014 and Spring of 2015 is a few octaves higher than this year. :)