Trucks coming into and out of the facility should be washed and disinfected. While every rule is not practised on every farm, many producers in Ontario use these combinations to protect their investment from disease outbreaks. The stakes are high. Disease outbreaks are costly and cannot be endured with the trend to low margins. Vaccination programs need to be carefully designed for each herd.
Many commercial vaccines are available for general protection of animals.
They are a necessary part of the disease arsenal and certainly preferential to antimicrobials. More use can be made of autogenous vaccines to target strains specific to a farm. Education and awareness of the issues are tools used by the Ontario pork industry to reduce the use of antibiotics. Swine medicine courses are delivered with the intent to increase the knowledge of producers in product knowledge, dosages, withdrawal times, injection sites, etc. The daylong course concludes with a test.