Pipestone Veterinary Services News

On this exceptionally frigid morning my truck thermometer is reading -18°F.  Yes, that is a negative sign in front of the 18. Lucky for me, most pigs in Iowa are raised indoors. After a cold trip from my truck to the building I am in a toasty barn set to...

The pig of the week this week is 17 days old. She and her siblings will be moving soon from the crate they call home to a new barn with other piglets their age - sort of like Kindergarten Graduation!

This time of year we seem to get call after call about pregnant ewes losing appetite and slowing down or sometimes going down. These fall under a broad category, “Pregnancy Disease” much like cattle get Shipping Fever. There are a lot of causes, parasitism, flukes and stomach worms, injury and...

Now that we are well into lambing, I thought perhaps we should discuss some of the products we have developed and used to keep lambs and kids alive and healthy. The main cause of death is starvation once they are born alive. The first area of concern would be iodine...

Lately, it seems like every day there is some one firing a shot at agriculture. Recently the Sioux Fall Argus Leader a regional newspaper in a primary agriculture area prints an article submitted by PETA verbatim entitled 'Make this a fur-free, wool-free winter.’ Part of that article dealt with shearing...

The availability of sulfadimethoxine has become nonexistent. Sulfamethazine is in short supply as well. We have obtained a supply of sulfamethazine that will be available until it's exhausted. My concern is that the sulfa drugs are the only effective treatment of clinical coccidiosis. Sulfaquinoxaline has been discontinued years ago. I...

Helpful vocabulary Weaning: When piglets switch from being with their mother and drinking her milk to being on their own on a diet of solid food. Sow Farm: The farm where piglets are born and where the sows (moms) live. In my last post The Birthing Process, I gave all...

By: Dr. Bryan Myers Its one on the toughest phone calls a pork producer can receive —a call that your hog barn is on fire.  Unfortunately, this is a tragedy I had to experience this year.  More often than not, barn fires result in extensive loss of both property and animals.  I cannot stress...

By: Jamie Smith Consumers want more information than ever.  They want to know where their meat came from, how the animal was raised, and everything in between.  Thus – the ever complicated world of farm audits was born, creating a series of hoops for producers to jump through.   You may...

The pig of the week is this red piglet! She is about 2 days of age. She is the only red head in a litter full of blondes.