Craig Rowles has just one question for pork producers to consider, ‘if you had African swine fever on your farm today, would you know what to do?’

“Would you know how to euthanize the pigs? Would you know what you were going to do with them after you euthanized them? Because if you haven't thought about it, you better,” says the general manager of cage-free operations for Versova.

Prior to joining the layer operation, Rowles served as general manager and partner of Elite Pork Partnership, an 8,000-sow farrow-to-finish operation. A veterinarian by trade, Rowles jokes that one of the reasons he left the pork industry in 2014 was concerns surrounding porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus. He was also concerned about things like ASF.

“And so, I made the decision in 2014 to sell, and in 2015 when I threw all my eggs into the egg business, we started breaking with avian influenza, another foreign animal disease,” Rowles says. “So, the poultry industry blames me for being the ‘Typhoid Mary.’ I'll accept that, I guess. But it's been a wild ride.”

Versova is the second largest layer operation in the United States with 40 million layers. Twelve million of that are cage-free. The company operates in Iowa, Ohio, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado, and has 1,900 employees. Today the firm is about 34% cage-free. Rowles predicts the company will be more like 50/50 in the next four to five years.

Seventy-five percent of Versova’s cage-free egg production goes into the processed market. The eggs are broken on farm, shipped to a plant, pasteurized, packaged and then shipped out.

With this much at stake, the company invested $2.5 million alone in their Sioux Center, Iowa operation for a biosecurity building just for showering.

“One of the things that we learned out of the 2015 outbreak was that we had a lot of lateral transmission of virus between farms because the biosecurity procedures were not in place,” Rowles says. “And so, we got through 2015 and now the '22 break came and things started to change because we were not seeing necessarily lateral transmission based on the genetic sequencing, but we're still seeing a significant number of point source infections.”

Now HPAI can be found in wild birds in every state, and on every continent, he says.  Since February 2022, 69 million of the 300 million layers in the United States have succumbed to the virus.

Since avian influenza (H5N1) was first detected in a dairy farm in March, Versova has lost 6 million birds.

“This has really created a problem for us, and it was really frustrating for us at Center Fresh, where I thought we had our best biosecurity ever. We had the showers in place, we had the procedures in place, our people were giving us great compliance, and we broke with this virus in the middle of the farm, in the middle of a barn,” Rowles says.

The company lost another farm more recently that was located near a dairy in Weld County, Colorado.

“I think the message for pork producers is this, No. 1 … there haven't been any isolations of this particular virus in pigs yet,” Rowles says. “But we're just one step removed from that happening and the pigs are a great mixing vessel, and so I think there's a chance that we're going to be worried about avian influenza in pigs someday.”

While biosecurity procedures in the swine industry have improved over the years, Rowles says producers need to realize when a break happens, things happen very quickly.

“If you had an ASF break, do you know how you would euthanize your pigs? Have you thought about it? Because if you haven't, I think you should,” Rowles says.

Likewise, after euthanasia, producers need to know what they are going to do with the mortalities, and Rowles says that takes time, money and a lot of ground. When Versova’s Sioux Center site broke, it took 90 acres of ground for the composted 4.2 million birds. For just 1 million birds, it took 26 heaters, five payloaders, five tractors, feeder mixer wagons, 150 truckloads of carbon material, 150 people and $2.5 million.

Finally, Rowles encourages pork producers to be proactive and enroll their sites in the U.S. Swine Health Improvement Plan. SHIP is modelled after the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP), a collaborative effort involving industry, state and federal partners providing standards for certifying the health status of greater than 99% of commercial scale poultry and egg operations across the U.S.

“It is modeled so that you can have that same sort of pathway for discussion with the regulators and the academics and producers that can produce those certifications so that if in fact ASF comes to the United States, or CSF, … its talking about certification of freedom from disease so that you can move pigs to market in the face of an outbreak,” Rowles says. “It will give you the opportunity to have a voice in how regulatory and certification processes are put in place.”