An electronic medicine book for pigs is now available for all UK pig producers.
Public and political pressure has seen the pig industry act to put itself in a more informed position on its antibiotic use and eMB-Pigs has been developed by AHDB Pork and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) as a result.
According to AHDB Pork veterinary team manager Martin Smith at present only total antibiotic sales data for pigs and poultry are available, which does not give an accurate picture of pig-specific use.
“eMB-Pigs provides an electronic version of the existing paper medicine book,” Smith said. “It’s a convenient way to record and quantify usage so producers can review and optimise their antibiotic use.
“For a long time now, it’s been a legal requirement for all pig producers to keep a medicine book on farm to record all medication administered to livestock.
“And it’s recently become a requirement of Red Tractor farm assurance schemes that annual, aggregated, records of antibiotic use are kept, which include antibiotics administered in feed. eMB-Pigs will help producers collate this information.”
Producers will be able to use the eMB-Pigs website to enter their total antibiotic usage and will be able to replace their current medicine recording book or system.
Smith continued: “Future system developments will allow farm management software and mobile apps to interact with the eMB and automatically upload medicine usage data onto the system.
“What’s more, the long-term view is that eMB-Pigs will help individual producers compare their on-farm usage to anonymised data from other similar units, to help them review their approach to antibiotic use and make management changes to reduce production costs.
“It will also be able to provide an anonymised, aggregated national record of total antibiotic usage for the VMD, when needed.”
The eMB-Pigs website is supported by Northern Ireland and the Scottish and Welsh levy bodies.
It is the first time a system of this type has been run for the pig industry.
Access to eMB-Pigs is through the same log-in details already used for the AHDB Pig Hub and eAML2 at www.pighub.org.uk. Once registered, users can also login directly at emb-pigs.ahdb.org.uk
Producers using their own online recording systems have been asked to speak directly to Martin Smith to discuss integration with the new system.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
