Manure and Pasture Management to Reduce Swine Parasites in Western Washington Organic Pastured Pork Production

View the project final report

Commodities

• Agronomic: barley
• Animals: swine

Practices

• Animal Production: grazing - rotational, manure management, parasite control
• Education and Training: farmer to farmer, on-farm/ranch research, workshop
• Production Systems: transitioning to organic
• Soil Management: composting
• Sustainable Communities: local and regional food systems

Managing swine intestinal parasites continues to be an obstacle for pig farmers seeking to certify their pork as Organic. Since Ivermectin was removed from the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances in 2016, there is a lack of organically-approved veterinary options for control, as well as a lack of information on best management practices for control in organic pork production systems for the various regions of the United States (Percy, 2019). Alluvial Farms based our project on research work being done concurrent with our project through a collaboration of the University of Minnesota, Kutztown University and Rodale Institute. This multiyear national study was funded by the US Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture program (USDA NIFA) for 2018-2020. It explored manure and pasture management strategies that would control swine parasites by reducing parasite contamination and transmission in organic pig production (Yuzhi, Hernandez, Carr, 2019).

In the three-year research project we have just concluded, Alluvial Farms followed some of the same protocols of this larger national study to evaluate parasite pressures on our own farm. We have been in business for eight seasons and on our own 45 acre farm for five. Over our five years here we have produced certified organic small grains and other crops, experimented with certifying our pork as Organic, and finally settled on certifying our pork as Animal Welfare Approved, by A Greener World. We established a protocol and a practice for on-farm parasite monitoring, and collected a year's worth of information about baseline parasite presence on farm. We will then taught ourselves to measure parasite presence in soil and bedding, following protocols from our mentors at Rodale. We used this technique to determine effectiveness of thermophilic composting of bedding and manure for eliminating swine parasites. We also determined additional interventions we could test for effectiveness at managing swine parasites on organic farms, such as the Rodale experiment test of biofumigation of pastures with brassica crops.

Our project addressed all three aspects of sustainable agriculture as defined by SARE:

• environmental stewardship through parasite management on pastured-based hog systems,
• economic profitability by aiming to increase weight gains and carcass yields through parasite mitigation strategies
• and the social component of increased quality of life for family farmers through increased income potential if we could develop a management protocol that would allow us mitigate the negative effects on animal welfare created by parasite pressure.  

1. Evaluate parasite prevalence on our Animal Welfare Approved, eleven sow and one board pig farm in Western Washington, with special focus on the presence of three common parasites: Oesophagostomum spp. “nodular worms,” Ascaris suum “large intestinal roundworm,” and Trichuris suis “swine whipworm.”
2. Establish thermophilic composting facility on-farm. 
3. Develop skills to test compost inputs and outputs for parasite presence in order to determine the effectiveness of manure composting on eliminating these swine parasites and their underlying reproductive mechanisms.
4. Develop skills to test pig pasture soils for parasite presence in order to determine the effectiveness of biofumigation of pastures with brassica plants at reducing swine parasite presence in soils. 
5. Share results with local, regional, and national producer community.