Better Pork -December 2002
BEHIND THE LINES
by ROBERT IRWINStart talking to farmers about labour on pig farms and something immediately becomes evident. The recent rapid evolution in swine farming requires a similar evolution in thinking staffing Running today's pig barns, whether part of a three-site production loop or a farrow-to-finish operation requiring labour in excess of family members, takes a new set of skills. Over and over again, we were told while conducting interviews, it's as much about managing people as it is about managing pigs.
The farmers who have recognized this challenge and been able to respond to it are more likely to have their labour requirements in hand. Others, it appears, are not as fortunate.
One producer to whom we spoke cited an industry story about a unit in southwestern Ontario where staff turnover was rampant. "We understand they (issued) between 52 and 54 T-4 slips in the first year of operation. Based on its size, it should have had a staff of nine or 10 people. Sometimes it's easier to get the financing and to build the buildings than to train the people and get the workforce," this senior farm manager said.
Pork industry staffing problems don't just occur on farms. Ontario Pork has become known for high staff turnover in recent years. Amidst varying degrees of controversy, five people have come and gone from the position of chief executive officer since 1994. By far the most talked about hiring, though, is the recent appointment of Jack Slibar, former executive director of the Toronto Humane Society. Soon after the announcement, producers began calling our offices, as well as those of the pork board and the Ontario Farm Animal Council. The general tone of the questions was: "Have the pork board directors lost their minds?" Most had heard bits and pieces of the controversies surrounding Slibar's efforts to guide an organization known in the past for numbering zealous animal rightists among its members.
Much of the hoopla surrounding Slibar consists of innuendo and ill-founded rumour. Other aspects involve hotly debated issues with two legitimate points of view. The only way to deal fairly with the situation seemed to be to get all the key issues out and give Slibar an opportunity to set the record straight. That meant telling you a lot more about the Toronto Humane Society (click here for the story) than you may have ever wanted to know.
When Better Pork interviewed him, Slibar responded openly and fully to all questions. That's something the rumour mill said he wouldn't do. If he deals as openly with the contentious issues facing the pork industry, he should have a bright future.BP
© copyright 2002 AgMedia Inc..
back Better Pork - December 2002
The competition is on for skilled workers in the pork industry
A growing industry needs more workers. And bigger and fewer farms means fewer owner-operators and more employees. The result? More opportunities for workers, the need for different skill sets and a greater challenge for employers in finding themby DON STONEMAN
When Lucan-based Premium Pork was looking for new employees this fall to run its growing string of barns in Ontario (14 SEW sow barns and one nursery), human resources manager Darlene Turmel opted to hold a job fair.Two job fairs, actually. One took place at a community hall in Glencoe at about the same time as the International Plowing Match. Another was held in mid-October at the community centre in Lucan, near Premium's offices.
"Not everybody has access to a HRDC (Human Resources Development Canada) computer and not everybody looks at a newspaper. I thought this would be an opportunity to reach a lot of people, offer them a place to meet us and see what we are all about," Turmel said. Community centres are neutral ground for prospective employees, who seem to be more comfortable there asking questions than dropping off a resume at an office.
Was the job fair a success? "It was really good," Turmel says with enthusiasm. "I hired quite a few people that way."
Have job fairs been held to staff Premium's Manitoba barns as well? "Not yet, but they will be," Turmel replies confidently.
Ontario's growing pork industry needs workers. Bigger and fewer farms mean that more swine workers are employees, rather than owner-operators. "It seems to be fairly difficult to attract people to the industry," says Gerald Jantzi, a part-owner in Quantum Pork, based at Millbank, on the border between Perth County and Waterloo Region, the heart of the province's pork industry. "We are just about always looking for staff," Jantzi says.
The most opportunities for workers, and the most challenge for employers, is in farrowing operations like Quantum, with 5,000 sows. They are by far the most labour-intensive and require the most expertise. If a lot of farrowing operations are looking for labour right now, Better Pork didn't find them among the high-profile operations contacted. Not all the high-profile operations Better Pork contacted were looking for labour.
Joanne Selves, president of Selves Farms Ltd. of Fullarton, feels like she is out of touch as far as hiring is concerned, but she isn't complaining. "It has been a nice thing," she admits. Selves Farms has had a stable work force for the past five years in their 2,750-sow farrow-to-finish operation. Five staffers, about half of the barn staff, have been at Selves for 10 years or more. "But I know from talking to (other producers) that finding people when you want to find them is a bit of a trick," she says. "It's part of the whole package of getting bigger."
Additional requirements, such as Certified Quality Assurance (CQA) standards have put "new demands on employees." This year, she says, Selves Farms focused on paper trails and record keeping. "It's not the most thrilling part of their day," Selves says. "On average, they would prefer to be hands-on rather than paper people."
Widely varying skill sets
Though some watchers say the pork industry is at a crisis because of labour, Wayne Booth disagrees. Booth is manager of Paradigm Swine Network Inc., headquartered north of Moorefield in Wellington County. If there was a critical labour shortage, it would prevent individual farms from making improvements in production and new barns wouldn't be built because there were no workers to run them, Booth says. He doesn't see that happening, at least not yet.Paradigm Swine buys baby pigs of specific genetic background from operators running about 3,000 sows and contracts with nurseries and feeder barns to finish them to market weight. A 1,200-sow barn requires three to four full-time employees seven days a week.
"They are independently owned farms, but they rely on us to help manage their businesses," Booth says. Paradigm "may nor may not" be involved in hiring individuals to work on these farms, Booth says.
The skills needed to run the barns vary widely, he points out. "On the one hand, you need somebody who is probably next thing to an MBA to manage the operation, the data and the financial side, and to record the tracing of all the animals and what stage they are at in their gestation. And you need people at $8 to $10 an hour simply for scraping manure out from behind the sows and pressure-washing five days a week," Booth says.
"The biggest thing that we deal with is, number one, trying to find the people prepared to do the less than desirable jobs on a day-to-day basis and not move on. And, number two, finding the people who are highly skilled and aren't interested in going out and doing something on their own."
And then there are the conflicts between them. "One of our farm owners admits that he is frustrated by men working at the lesser jobs who live paycheque to paycheque. That's all they want to achieve and he can't relate to them. Ideally, we need people who fit anywhere along the chain and who move up or down from where they begin."
Booth sounds a note heard from other operators as well. "Hiring someone with little or no experience is almost better than hiring someone with experience simply because management and technology has changed pretty drastically in the last five to eight years. Someone that's got no experience but is just as enthusiastic about livestock picks up on the new technology a lot easier."
Sometimes Paradigm hires through local newspapers but mostly it is done by word of mouth. "It's not a good practice to be hiring people away from other operations. It's way too small an industry for that," Booth says.
The money that highly skilled workers can make is impressive. "I know some top managers are making more money than you or I ever think," Booth says, mentioning a salary in the $100,000 range for a job that stretches to six days a week "with lunch and a couple of coffee breaks. It's pretty flexible. It's not a bad lifestyle."
With its business expanding, Brussels-based Acre-T Farms is almost always looking for someone to fill a vacancy, says marketing manager Dave Frank. "On the plus side, the system is large enough now that we can train in-house. We don't necessarily need experienced people."
However, adds Frank, "You have to pay a competitive wage. It's difficult to find people to do that kind of work and you have to make sure they are properly compensated for it."
Acre-T advertises in the newspapers and contacts the agricultural colleges. Last year, the farm had a booth at a job fair at the Ontario Agriculture College, University of Guelph. Acre T didn't attend this year, Frank says.
Price of failure is high
Agricultural employers have often complained that they can't find or keep good labour because of competition from other industries, but Ontario Pork director Curtiss Littlejohn, who farms in Ayr, has seen the other side. When he advertised this year for a farrowing room attendant, he received 230 responses. He's next door to a huge population base in Waterloo and Halton regions and doubts if he would get that kind of response if he were located in Perth or Huron Counties.One of his successful job applicants left a company where she was working on a computer medical website to work in a pig barn. The new job was more challenging and the pay was just as good, Littlejohn says.
Yet recruiting isn't always easy, says John Alderman, head of operations at Coldsprings Farm in Thamesford. Not all barns are successful and the success of the recruiting depends on the management, he asserts.
He cites a story about a unit in southwestern Ontario where the staff turnover was rampant. "We understand they (issued) between 52 and 54 T-4 slips in the first year of operation. Based on its size, it should have had a staff of nine or 10 people. Sometimes it's easier to get the financing and to build the buildings than to train the people and get the workforce," he says.
The price of failure on the human resources side in a new barn is high. "The difference in cash flow between hitting breeding and farrowing targets from the get-go and hitting 50 to 60 per cent of the targets is huge," Alderman says. "It all depends on production scheduling, and people management and having properly trained staff," Alderman says.
Though Coldsprings doesn't have a labour problem today, Alderman admits it had one several years ago. The solution? "It's training. It's recruiting. It's being responsive to employees' needs, as in any business."
Regardless of whether they are in agriculture, in auto assembly or in an office, "people like the same sorts of things," Alderman says. "They want respect and to be reasonably compensated. A lot of organizational and production skills are needed to make the barn work properly. You can't take someone who has 10 years experience in a barn and make him a manager. His production skills aren't as important as his people skills."
Vice-chairman Larry Skinner of Mitchell represents Ontario Pork on the labour issues co-ordinating committee, which is made up of representatives from many agricultural sectors in Ontario. Though he admits he doesn't have a real handle on the need for labour on pig farms -- "I don't know if anybody really does" -- he believes there is a definite need for trained personnel.
Apprenticeship program on the way
For a while, it looked as if Ontario's pork industry might be getting such a handle on pork industry labour demands. Earlier this year, the Ontario Pork Industry Council made a presentation to Ontario Pork to put money into the Agricultural Labour Issues Management in Ontario (ALIMO) project.The goal was to assemble an industry fund and get matching money from HRDC to set up a pilot project looking at labour issues in the pork sector. It's not clear what happened, but the ALIMO project won't proceed this year. A pork board spokesman says it appeared that producers would be funding the industry side of the initiative by themselves.Ingrid Chyc, managing director for the Ontario Pork Industry Council (OPIC), says the ALIMO pork project has been shelved, but only temporarily. "Getting funds requires more discussion with the membership," Chyc says. "We missed the (HRDC-imposed) time limit with this one" and the project will be postponed for another year.
Another labour project has been more successful. Recently, the Business and Training Group at Ridgetown College announced a Swine Apprenticeship program, to be overseen by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. The apprenticeship involves between 4,000 and 5,000 work hours with 90 per cent of the time spent on the job and 10 per cent spent in the classroom. Jantzi, Booth and pork board director Curtiss Littlejohn are all fans of this project.
"A lot of people have no idea of the complexity of the job," Littlejohn says. "I have an international ticket to fix cars and trucks. A skilled herds person that is a barn manager would have no problem making that kind (trained mechanic's) of wage," Running a swine barn "is comparable to any of the skilled trades -- plumber, electrician or truck mechanic."
Moreover, notes Littlejohn, a barn manager must have the people skills to work with staff, good stockmanship abilities and also be able to change a motor if a fan burns out. "He has to know when to call the owner. But, when he can't reach somebody, he mustn't be afraid to make a decision either."
However, fully apprenticed swine workers won't be waving their certificates any time soon. The first apprentices will likely begin the program next summer.
In the meantime, the bigger farm operations are going ahead with their own advanced recruiting schemes. Elite Swine Ltd, based in Landmark, Man., is Canada's largest pork producing operation by far. Lyndon Stewart, its Ontario manager of operations, says that "referrals and networking" and "not a lot of advertising" produce an adequate number of job candidates in established areas in Elite's Manitoba operations.
In Ontario, a new territory, Elite makes use of career fairs at agricultural colleges and universities. A career fair at Guelph in late October garnered a list of 30 to 40 candidates, which will be winnowed down to 12 to 15, Stewart says. Elite also picks up skilled workers from Paraguay, the Philippines and the United Kingdom, an indication of where the industry has gone in that country. The pig industry in Britain in particular has been in sharp decline in recent years.
Elite works hard at keeping people, Stewart says, offering health plans, pension benefits, career paths and a management-training program for second-year university students, as well as a high school graduate program for workers who don't intend to go on to post-secondary education.
The management-training program puts students in one phase of production for a summer. "If it works, we bring them back in another area. By graduation, they know if we are a company they want to work for," Stewart says.
This coming summer, Elite will offer jobs to three or four students on three Ontario farms for the first time. In Manitoba, "there's likely three times that many." There's also a scholarship program for high school graduates going on to study agriculture. Back in Lucan, as Darlene Turmel and events manager Cathy Rahn talk to a reporter, Herman Lansink, chief executive officer for Premium, drops in to tell her that he heard both Acre T and Elite Swine were at a university job fair and Turmel vows not to miss the next one.
The pork industry may be too small for one farm to poach a highly-prized employee from another, but it's not too small to permit highly visible and competitive bidding for new graduates.
Looks like it's a good time to hold a diploma in animal science, or maybe your papers as a fully qualified swine worker, if there were such a creature in 2003. BP
© copyright 2002 AgMedia Inc..
back Managing immune status for better disease control
It's unrealistic to believe that we can raise pigs in a bubble. Managing immune responses requires a balance between exposure and prevention at the outset
by RICHARD SMELSKI
One skill the swine stockman must possess is knowing when to balance disease exposure against the cost of eliminating diseases. It is very high risk and costly to be totally free of diseases.Disease-free pigs derived by caesarian have to live in a bubble just to survive.
Because these pigs have had no previous exposure to disease and lack immune status, they are totally vulnerable to the slightest exposure. Managing immune status may mean deliberate exposure in controlled doses (exposure or vaccination). Otherwise, complete elimination of diseases may require us to produce pigs in bubble-like conditions to prevent any new disease challenges. It is not realistic to think that we will be free of disease, especially as size and systems get larger. Instead, it might be wiser to manage the immune status.
The immune system is defined as having two components -- non-specific (or native) and specific (or acquired). The non-specific defence mechanisms are present even if an animal has not had any previous exposure to an antigen. Non-specific immunity is immediate, giving time for the specific immune system to gear up for further defence. Specific or acquired immunity requires an antigen or a foreign substance not part of the body's normal environment to contact and develop the immune system. This immunity is more thorough.
The non-specific immune system consists of physical and chemical barriers such as skin layers, normal flora, mucus, pH levels, numerous enzymes and white blood cells capable of killing and "eating" the bacteria or viruses. As these reactions take place, so do physiological changes in the body -- blood flow changes, energy diversion, adrenalin and even things like diarrhea (required for flushing toxins from the gut). These native defence mechanisms are ready to go to work at a moment's notice when an infectious agent enters the body. However, bacteria and viruses capable of producing diseases have evolved to avoid being killed by this native defence mechanism, and we require the acquired immune system to control them.
The acquired or specific immune system is antigen- and memory-driven. It requires two to three weeks to reach optimal functional capacity unless it had previous exposure. Upon second exposure, the specific immune response is much more rapid due to a memory response. B and T lymphocytes are major components of the specific immune response. It is these memory cells that remember the foreign substance and either activate or suppress further immune activity.
Keeping in mind factors that trigger or depress the immune response, one can only conclude that the variations in an operation are endless, thus making larger populations increasingly more susceptible to exposure and outbreaks. One solution is to select for pigs with genetically superior immune systems. Another method is to minimize all stresses of pigs to prevent nutrients from being diverted from growth and reproduction to costly life-sustaining activities. But, as operations get larger, the task of catering to individual animals which are suspect gets more difficult and outbreaks become more likely.
Disease abhors a vacuum, meaning that as you remove one set of bacteria or viruses, others fill the space. That is why high-health herds have different disease challenges than regular health herds. As we advance with vaccines, management and biosecurity, so do diseases with mutations, virility and cross-reaction increase. One can only conclude that managing immune responses requires a balance of exposure to prevention in the first place. It is unrealistic to believe we can raise pigs in a bubble.BP
Richard Smelski is a hog technical services manager for Agribrands Purina and a former Ontario government swine specialist
© copyright 2002 AgMedia Inc..
back Better Pork - December 2002
PRRS vaccine test shows decreased boar semen quality
Seven of 11 boars tested showed a decrease in semen quality after vaccination, suggesting that producers should evaluate the semen quality of vaccinated boarsby Cate Dewey
We use vaccinations to give pigs protection against viruses and bacteria that cause disease. When the pig is injected with the vaccine, its immune system produces antibodies that are specifically designed to kill the virus. Then, when the pig is infected with the field virus, it has some protection with which to fight the field virus.The vaccine actually contains an altered or modified virus -- modified enough so that it does not cause the same disease as the field virus but not modified too much. Viruses that are modified too much do not stimulate the pig to produce the antibody necessary to protect the pig against the field virus. Killed virus vaccines do not multiply in the pig's body. Modified live virus vaccines do multiply in the pig's body and can be spread from one pig to another. Although we would prefer to use killed virus vaccines, for some diseases, when we kill the virus, the pig is unable to produce antibodies that are effective against the field virus.
The Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) vaccine is a modified live virus vaccine. Kevin Vilaca, a graduate student, vaccinated boars with the PRRS vaccine to see what effect the vaccine had on the semen quality of the boars. (The boars in the study came from PRRS negative herds. The results of the study may have differed if the boars had had previous exposure to the PRRS virus.)
Semen was collected and evaluated from each of 11 boars once a week for six weeks. Then the boars were vaccinated with the modified live PRRS vaccine (Ingelvac(r) PRRS ATP). The semen samples from the boars were again evaluated once a week for seven weeks after vaccination. A sample of each ejaculate was retained for PRRSV RNA analysis via PCR to determine if the vaccine virus was present in the semen.
Seven of the 11 boars had a decrease in semen quality after vaccination. Some boars were affected one week after vaccination, others not until three weeks after vaccination. The motility of the sperm decreased by eight per cent and the percentage of abnormal acrosomes increased by 16 per cent. Seven of the 11 boars failed two or more of the minimum semen quality parameters (set by boar studs selling semen for artificial insemination) after being vaccinated. The PRRS virus appeared to affect the sperm that was in the early stages of development. The decreased semen quality lasted from one to seven weeks after vaccination. The affect on semen quality may last for a longer period in some boars. This study did not examine boars more than seven weeks post-vaccination. Similar effects of the PRRS virus have been shown by other researchers using wild virus strains and the original modified live PRRS vaccine.
The semen from the boars was tested for the PRRS virus using a PCR test. All tests were negative, which suggests that the boars were not shedding the vaccine virus in the semen. Previous research by Dr. Christopher-Hennings using the original modified live PRRS vaccine (ResPRRS(r)) in boars showed that the vaccine virus was shed in the semen.
The PRRS vaccine is not licensed for use in boars. The use of the vaccine in this manner is an extra-label use. Some producers and owners of boar studs choose to use the PRRS vaccine in boars to provide protection against infection with the wild strain of the virus. Because the vaccine has a negative impact on semen quality, producers must evaluate the semen quality of boars vaccinated against PRRS.
I appreciate the financial support of Ontario Pork, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Ontario Agri-Food Industry, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The vaccine was provided by Boehringer Ingelheim Canada Ltd. BP
Cate Dewey is a professor in the Department of Population Medicine, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph.
© copyright 2002 AgMedia Inc..
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