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Dry spring reduces risk of spreading PED

May 5, 2015, Winnipeg, Man – The president of La Broquerie, Man., based Precision Pumping says the relatively dry spring has been a big help in minimizing the risk of spreading the virus responsible for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.

As a result of this year’s early spring, the seasonal ban on spreading livestock manure ended 10 days earlier than normal, April 1.

Doug Redekop, the president of Precision Pumping, says, despite the early spring melt and relatively dry weather conditions, the biggest challenges faced by manure applicators so far has been ice in the lagoons and getting equipment stuck in the fields but the risk of spreading PED remains top of mind.

“There is one crew that has isolated their equipment and was anticipating pumping just PED sites and then one of the other PED positive sites, they have their own equipment and so I think the key here is that not everyone is going to be actively out there looking to pump these sites,” he said.

“We can be happy in the fact that it’s been drier. PED and the spread of PED is a lot like TGE and so if you’ve got wet moist conditions and you have the ability to track the virus with either mud or manure or so on and so forth, wet damp conditions would certainly be your enemy so the dry conditions have certainly been a positive.”

Redekop says, with every PED case that has been identified, the pork industry has worked tirelessly to identify the source of the disease and as far as he knows there have been no incidents where manure applicators have been identified as the source of spread.