Farmscape for June 11, 2018

The Chief Veterinarian with the National Pork Producer's Council says the U.S. pork sector has adapted well to changes in regulations governing the acquisition and use of antibiotics in livestock production.
Effective January 1, 2017 all labels for approval of growth promotion for medically important antibiotics were discontinued for food animals and the remaining therapeutic uses for disease treatment, control and prevention came under veterinary oversight.
Dr. Liz Wagstrom, the Chief Veterinarian with the National Pork Producer's Council, says the sector had three years to prepare for the changes, producers and veterinarians worked closely with the Food and Drug Administration as the rules were written and an effort was made to determine what would work for practicing veterinarians and the feed mills so everyone was very well prepared.

Clip-Dr. Liz Wagstrom-National Pork Producer's Council:
I think that the adjustment varied by the type of producer you are.
If you are a system that has company veterinarians it was just a matter of adjusting some of your protocols but you had veterinarians on staff, you had the infrastructure in place to be able to do this.
For some of the smaller independent producers it took a lot more time with their veterinarian to make sure that they had their communication channels set up.
For many of the veterinary clinics, a lot of them have gone to electronic VFDs where they can do it on line with a company that has got all the security clearances to store and transmit that data to the feed mills.
They can store that data so it's easily accessible in case of an FDA inspection.
That been I think one of the big adjustments in the overwhelming adaptation of electronic feed directives.

Dr. Wagstrom says we don't yet have antibiotic sales figures for 2017 but even in 2016 we saw significant declines in the volume of antibiotics being used.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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