Maine Farmcast Episode 21: Biosecurity with Carol Delaney

On this episode of the Maine Farmcast, Dr. Glenda Pereira, Assistant Extension Professor and State Dairy Specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, has a conversation with Carol Delaney about general livestock biosecurity practices. Carol Delaney is the Livestock Specialist for the Animal Health group at the Maine Department of Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. The Animal Health group focuses on helping to prevent the introduction and spread of contagious diseases among poultry and livestock, promote public health and food safety as it relates to zoonotic disease, to enhance the quality and health of livestock, and to maintain fair practices in the buying and selling of poultry and livestock.

Episode Resources

Automated Transcript

Glenda Pereira: 00:32

Welcome to The Maine Farmcast. This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an assistant extension professor in dairy specialist for the University of Maine, as well as an assistant professor within the School of Food and Agriculture. Today’s featured guest is Carol Delaney, who is the livestock specialist and is part of the animal health program at the Maine Department of Ag. And, we are recording the episodes on August 1, 2024. And so, Carol, thank you for being here and for talking about our topic today on biosecurity.

Glenda Pereira: 01:09

If you could, just give us an introduction about yourself.

Carol Delaney: 01:13

Great. Thank you so much, Glenda. I’m so happy to be here. As she said, Carol Delaney, and I’m the livestock specialist working for the animal health program in the Department of Ag, Conservation, and Forestry in the state of Maine. And what I do specifically, is work with producers on learning about biosecurity and implementing those measures, as well as understanding the regulations that help prevent disease.

Carol Delaney: 01:37

My background briefly is I’ve raised just about every animal. I’ve been farm manager. I raise turkeys, chickens, pigs, dairy cows, beef cows. Yeah. So that way, I have a familiarity with many animals even though my main background is in small ruminants and dairy.

Glenda Pereira: 01:54

So it’s fantastic that you have that broad scope across all of the species, even though there’s specific details for each species, right, that that there’s certain biosecurity measures you wanna take depending on your species and risk. But for today’s episode, your expertise in in multi species is gonna come in handy. So why are we talking about biosecurity and maybe why why has some of your role been in, helping farmers and producers implement biosecurity measures?

Carol Delaney: 02:27

Yeah. Well, first, let’s get a little definition that’s really easy to remember. It’s biosecurity is everything that’s done to keep pathogens, which are viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, and other microorganisms, away from livestock, property, and people. So that’s it. Everything you do keep the pathogens away from the host and infecting the environment.

Carol Delaney: 02:50

So that’s very simple. And because we don’t want animals to get sick or people to get sick or land to get contaminating. I did wanna say that even though it sounds like, oh, wow. This big word, biosecurity. Okay.

Carol Delaney: 03:05

Most of what you do on a farm or how you arrange, how you do things, or the building to build is for biosecurity. So one thing you do already is you you keep the best environment for your animals so they stay healthy. You feed the animals so that they have good immune system, so they can ward off disease. So you do that. You have a herd health plan with your veterinarian.

Carol Delaney: 03:25

You observe your animals for illness. You have individual animal ID, so you know which animal is sick, which isn’t, and you can tell others to identify them. You keep health records. You do vaccinations. You group animals, and you take care of them in the order of, like, young animals, kids, piglets, calves.

Carol Delaney: 03:48

Do them first to the most vulnerable, and then you do your sick animals last. You have a protocol, probably for mastitis, detection and treatment. So those are things you already do. Yeah. So I think one way to think about, biosecurity is that it’s written down.

Carol Delaney: 04:03

Dr. Hayley Springer, she’s the Penn State veterinarian. She put it this way, biosecurity is all about people, prevention, and protocol. So number 1 is people. And what do people do? Where do they go?

Carol Delaney: 04:18

And how do you communicate with them? So writing it down. That’s that’s really, what I wanna drive home today. But here’s something also. I I said you already do biosecurity.

Carol Delaney: 04:29

Here’s another way to think about writing it down, biosecurity plans and practices. So I asked myself, okay. What is what is it is there anything else like biosecurity planning, you know, that you do in your lives? And I said, is it like insurance? That’s is that sort of like plan?

Carol Delaney: 04:46

But I said, no. Insurance pays you for when things go wrong. Biosecurity plan is not insurance. It’s gonna prevent, so and minimize. Okay?

Carol Delaney: 04:54

That’s why you do it. I said, is it like having, like, a fire escape plan, like, in your family? It’s somewhat. It should be written down, like, with signs around. You should plan with it, like, you’ll have fire extinguishers.

Carol Delaney: 05:06

So it’s similar, but not exactly. And I so my last comparison was, is it like a financial plan? And I said, you know, it’s very much like that. You’re planning for ongoing need. You’re trying to prevent a situation for when you don’t have money for what you need.

Carol Delaney: 05:20

Like, say, you’re sending your children to college. Well, you’re gonna do something regularly and see how that changes things. You also need to be changing depending on what’s in the environment and revisiting your investments and things. So I think it’s more like a financial plan. And I think if you think of it that way, you can take off little bit bites of it, and it will augment your situation.

Carol Delaney: 05:41

I also wanna say that it isn’t only for animal health. It’s for human health. There are zoonotic diseases. That means diseases that humans and animals share together, and then there’s diseases that come in through the environment through wild animals. And this is actually humans, environment, and animals is called One Health.

Carol Delaney: 06:03

So that’s what our animal health program thinks about it. We don’t just think about animal disease. We think of One Health.

Glenda Pereira: 06:09

And so having it written somewhere is certainly a good practice. And so for folks and listeners who maybe need to think about, implementing One Health, don’t have one yet, where do they start? So so how do they start, and and who’s their first maybe resource or point of contact for that?

Carol Delaney: 06:34

Right. Well, the where you start is with people. We said people prevention protocol. So who who’s your team? Private veterinarians, University of Maine Extension, and our animal health program, I could help.

Carol Delaney: 06:48

And the way to simply start is who is the biosecurity coordinator? It’s sort of like an emergency sheet. Like you have you list your veterinarian, you list your farm location, your premises ID, but listing the livestock, you might have, many species in different buildings. So, like a fire emergency plan, you’d say child in here or something like that. So that’s good to have and to share and post.

Carol Delaney: 07:15

You wanna list your workers, and, also, this is a good place to list worker training or anybody training on biosecurity practices. All those things that you are already doing, just start writing it down. You may have already had different sheets on vaccination protocol, what to do when an animal gets mastitis, things like that. So just start writing down, and again, just a little bit at a time, and then put it in a binder, or in your folder on your computer. In terms of resources, you can go to, there’s something called Healthy Farms, Healthy Agriculture.

Carol Delaney: 07:52

That’s a website and a lot of resources developed by the University of Vermont for national use. You can, get biosecurity templates from farm. That’s made for dairy farmers. The other is secure, animal supply. There’s secure milk supply, secure sheep supply, shoot secure goat supply, secure swine supply, and all those are enhanced by a security plan.

Carol Delaney: 08:16

So you have a lot of places you can go to actually get templates on that.

Glenda Pereira: 08:20

And when is a good time to implement a plan too? Obviously, you wanna have one already so that you can try to present to prevent, introduction of disease. But when when is the best time to to be thinking about implementing 1? And and I know folks can start right today, but, if if there’s yeah. Go ahead.Carol Delaney: 08:46

Yeah. So, what are the most common ways that disease are introduced and therefore the riskiest activities? So if you’re asking when to do it, okay. Are you doing risky activities? That would be the time to say, well, if you’re gonna focus on any aspect, again, we’ve been very broad in what biosecurity covers.

Carol Delaney: 09:03

Okay. Animal to animal contact, that is a good way to spread disease. If your animals are all healthy, it doesn’t matter. But, so, if you have new animals, if you have sick animals on your farm, if you have wild animals coming in, I’m talking about birds roosting, walking over feed, and defecating of rodents running around, pets like cats even running around in the feed. These all this animal to animal contact, so that is where I would say start.

Carol Delaney: 09:37

If you have new so a quarantine area, for either sick animals or new animals. Okay? And you would work with your veterinarian to ask, well, how long do I need to quarantine? Or, you know wild animals too bring in disease, like we have the highly pathogenic avian influenza that is now affecting dairy cows and has affected goats also. That’s from wild waterfowl.

Carol Delaney: 10:05

So if they’re on your farm, how can you isolate or keep it away from the feed or your footwear coming in? And then your pets, like cats, spread disease. Their their feces spread disease, especially with sheep and goats if they eat contaminated feed. So you want to, be aware of that, also. The second way that animals are that animals get, infected is through human contact.

Carol Delaney: 10:33

Now Dr. Springer said people are the number one thing to think about in, biosecurity plants. So, humans, human contact, and usually what that means is they’re carrying the disease from the animals to another animal. And here’s an example she gave in a presentation to veterinarians was, cryptosporidium, it’s very potent and causes severe diarrhea, not only in calves or young stock or kids or lambs, it causes it in human, youth, and it’s very debilitating, and it can actually kill kill the animal or person. And, in in 6 days, a calf can shed hundreds of millions of oocytes that are what infect another animal.

Carol Delaney: 11:20

And she said just a quarter teaspoon of manure from a sick calf contains 90,000 oocytes of this cryptosporidium, and a calf will get infected with 25,000. So that’s just a quarter teaspoon. So if you walk and bring it into another stall, and and that animal ends up eating the piece of straw that rubbed off the manure on your boot, so human contact. So, other diseases also are spread by people, hoof and mouth, African swine fever, I said h highly pathogenic avian influenza. Hoof rot is also Internal parasites, if you bring in manure from another farm.

Carol Delaney: 12:03

Rabbit rabbit hemorrhagic disease, and so on. So you have to be careful of how you do things, and where did the person come from that came on to your farm? Where were their hooves, their feet? So, so you need to set up biosecurity for that. I would say those are the 2 biggest things, animal contact, human contact, obviously, equipment like, transport vehicles.

Carol Delaney: 12:28

But, just remember, a little goes a long way, in terms of being aware and preventing, especially manure, I would say is the biggest contaminant that will affect your herd.

Glenda Pereira: 12:41

Right. And you you kind of mentioned this, when talking about animal to animal contact. So minimizing the spread of disease by, for example, managing to keep wildlife out of your farm. But then how do we minimize, the spread of disease with people? And so, you know, for example, in my role, I I do have farmers travel to other farms for programming.

Glenda Pereira: 13:07

And so something that I keep, reminding everybody is if you’re going to come to somebody else’s farm, just make sure you left your house, didn’t go back into the barn, and get in the vehicle. Right? So that you’re not risking the the fact that you might go into your barn, get manure or, something else on your clothing, and then bring it to another farm. So that’s one way, is cleanliness, obviously, but clean clothes, I think, goes a long way. And like you mentioned in the beginning, starting, working with the most vulnerable to the, least vulnerable animals.

Glenda Pereira: 13:45

So if you’re on your farm, you know, who’s who’s the young stock? Because that’s gonna be the animals that are most vulnerable to disease. So work with them first, and then work your way back down. And then, obviously, diseased animals or animals that you’re treating, keeping or or interacting with them last so that you’re not starting with the diseased animal and then obviously infecting everything else. So I think those were 2, common ways.

Glenda Pereira: 14:11

Did you have, any others?

Carol Delaney: 14:16

I think in and to add a little bit more detail to the people aspect is that, when we talked about so an animal’s sick or it’s a new animal, you have a quarantine area. And that means they have separate housing, they’re fed with separate equipment and or fed last. They have their own feed buckets, and you also they have their own airspace. So they say minimally 6 feet away, but, really, you know, have that building face the other way than your other animals, something like that, for respiratory diseases. Now when you talk and then you talk about people, well, they should probably have their own boots and coveralls just for those animals.

Carol Delaney: 14:54

Even though they look totally healthy, it’s a new animal, do them. And, and maybe not have the person caring for your young stock, care for the new ones because it’s just too much of a chance. The other thing to do also is at the either right before they’re going into the most vulnerable animals or maybe usually, you do it right after you’re touching an animal that could infect another. Wash your hands. Have wash stations, and you can set up non water like, portable ones where they just use their feet.

Carol Delaney: 15:24

You know, just have them all over the place. That’s the best way. Cleaning comes before disinfection. So cleaning, that would be good to do. So knowing who’s gonna care for the animals and say, okay.

Carol Delaney: 15:35

You have separate boots and separate coveralls for that, or yourself do that. And then work with your veterinarian on the length of time and maybe testing for these sick or or new animals. And so talking about you were just talking about sending farmers to other farms. If someone’s coming on my farm, whether it’s another farmer or anybody, I I’m gonna ask them, have you been in contact with animals in the last 5 days? You can do it shorter, 3 days, 48 hours.

Carol Delaney: 16:04

But then then if they say yes, okay. Are you wearing the same clothes? Are you wearing the same boots? Okay. Those you know, if they are, that’s high risk.

Carol Delaney: 16:13

So put signs up all of your firm where their point of entry so that people see it again and again, you know, the same questions. And one question to ask is, are you feeling sick? Don’t come. If you have a swine operations, humans and pigs share a lot of the same diseases as well as birds. You don’t want someone sick coming into your farm that could share, the flu with them.

Carol Delaney: 16:42

So work on signs that the state actually has a a big folder, the Department of Ag, on all sorts of signs you can put on your farm that say bio secure area. And I would say them from my experience, the most useful thing to put on a sign is your phone number, because you wanna prevent people from going in. And sometimes just no one’s around, they’re like, well, I just gotta drop this thing off, or where are they? Can I go? Just say, you know, do not enter, but please call me, you know, and then you can give them instructions.

Carol Delaney: 17:12

So I would say putting up your phone number is a huge deal, that you’re the person to contact, you’re the biosecurity coordinator, or you’re the main person to let them in or not. The other thing is okay. We’re talking about people still mostly instead of animals, but that, I think, is very important. I would offer them if you have lots of people coming, like a group, I would you know, then probably plastic, footwear covers would be useful. If you only have a few people, then I would suggest, if they’re wearing boots to have a boot wash.

Carol Delaney: 17:45

If you wanna keep an extra set of boots around that are different sizes and not expensive ones because they’re only gonna be used intermittently. Say, oh, why don’t you put these on? They’re already cleaned and disinfected then. You’ve all set. So that so if you can focus on writing down what you do already and think about boot cleaning the footwear and asking people, you’re a long way toward getting towards your plan.

Carol Delaney: 18:11

So

Glenda Pereira: 18:12

Yeah. And you mentioned point of entry, which is probably where you wanna keep all these supplies. So if if you don’t have a point of entry already, maybe that’s where you can start too in addition to writing everything down is designating an area of your farm where it’s slow risks, it’s not it’s not near a pen of animals, It’s it’s not already, in an area where animals have access to an area outside of all of those things that that’s not coming into contact that an area where there isn’t already maybe manure, feed, and other things. So finding that point of entry, that’s low risk, and then maybe having a change of clothes or having a pair of boots, signage certainly there. So then people people know where to go, and they have direction for when they’re, coming on to your farm.

Glenda Pereira: 19:04

And like you said, Carol, it’s not necessarily just farmers, but maybe work with various ex service providers. And so you they you want them to be practicing, these measures on your farm as well. So, obviously, boots because they you you know, they’re touching feet wear because they’re touching manure, which can be tracked to another farm because it’s not always easy to get off of the thread of of your shoes. But boot covers is a is a great and inexpensive way to, really try to prevent and minimize disease transmission. And then was there, you you said you were gonna talk about disinfectants and cleanliness and disinfection.

Glenda Pereira: 19:48

So, let’s dig into that.

Carol Delaney: 19:51

Yeah. So, we’re kinda saving it for last, but it’s it’s pretty important. Okay. So the other thing is, most of the time, on your farm with your staff, with you, and anybody else who takes care of the animals And with people visiting, service providers, you know, extension, your veterinarian, they should be very cognizant. You want to clean and disinfect.

Carol Delaney: 20:16

And that’s you always hear the term c and d. And a lot of times, because people got used to in during the COVID-19 pandemic, sanitizer, just slap that on and you’re good. The best way of cleaning, surgeons use it. It’s still the standard. Soap and water, 20 seconds, and then rinse.

Carol Delaney: 20:36

What it does is it lifts the pathogens and it washes them away. So, personally, I’d rather do that than a sanitizer. I want them off. I mean, I don’t want them sticking around dead on my hands. So you can still use sanitizer for that.

Carol Delaney: 20:50

So don’t forget the hands too, with the people coming and going. Have a place for them to wash their hands. Okay. So what we’re trying to do with the footwear is get the pathogens off and killed. Okay?

Carol Delaney: 21:03

You do the best you can. These are rubber boots often or PVC, and there’s crevices inside. So what you want that’s you wanna try to wash those, treads clean as you can. And if you just use soap and water, especially with treads, you can probably get about 90, 95% of the dirt and bacteria and microbes away, and that’s pretty good. Okay?

Carol Delaney: 21:28

If you don’t have sanitize you don’t have disinfectant. Okay. Do that. At least do that. 2nd okay.

Carol Delaney: 21:34

The the way disinfectants work, they’re made to kill on contact, microbacteria and viruses and other microbes. They do it best, most of them, when there is no organic matter around. They can they do work with organic matter, but it it deactivates the chemicals. So over time, it doesn’t work. So the best protocol is to clean the footwear first, rinse, and then put it in the disinfectant.

Carol Delaney: 22:06

And I will say the EPA lists disinfectants that work against different diseases. It’s got to stay on the boots for a specific amount of time, and it’s got to be for the specific disease. So make sure the dilution is correct, make sure it’s gonna kill what you want, and you keep it on for the amount of time. The other thing to keep in mind is that hard water often does not mix well with these disinfectants. You have to read them.

Carol Delaney: 22:39

So each disinfectant has a safety sheet and some specs and EPA has a lot of information. But I can give you an example, What we use a lot with the with the state is it’s an oxidizing agent, and so it kind of binds and oxidizes and disrupts all the bacteria and viruses. So we use oxidizing agent called verkon s, and it’s relatively safe. It’s a powder or tablet. And, if you touch any disinfectant in its concentrated form, it’s caustic.

Carol Delaney: 23:16

It’s gonna you don’t want you know, you’re gonna have burns. But once it’s diluted, it’s not bad at all on your skin. It’s about a 1% solution, and you have to leave it on for 10 minutes. So just like stepping in, stepping out doesn’t work. I mean, it it might do a little bit, but why even do it?

Carol Delaney: 23:33

So that’s why, like, handing people boots or, maybe you have them put their boots in while you stand around and talk, and then they put it on. You can premix it actually. This is Virgo Nas for 7 days in a in a container. So you could just have it right there. After that, they don’t recommend using it, but you could have it ready.

Carol Delaney: 23:55

And I did a comparison of costs, and it’s only about 72¢ a gallon to mix that up. So even though you have to buy a big tub, and it might cost 80 or a $100, that’s what it costs you for a gallon. Now bleach is probably the cheapest. It’s broad spectrum as well as verkon, so it’s hypochlorite. And it will also kill foot and mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, and a lot of things.

Carol Delaney: 24:21

It in a concentrated form, I think you’re all familiar with it, it ruins clothes. It’s very caustic. You don’t want to mix it with acid, alcohol, or ammonium. There are different concentrations to mix it in depending what you want. And again, 10 minutes.

Carol Delaney: 24:37

You have to change it daily or when it looks dirty. It really is affected by organic matter. But it only costs 9¢ a gallon. So those are just two examples of choices and things to think about. But having the right dilution and contact time and whether it’s affected by hard water or a lot of organic matter is important to know.

Glenda Pereira: 25:00

Yeah. And I really appreciate you sharing that cost breakdown because at the end of the day, you you know, there’s so many costs on a farm, but I think, like you mentioned, this is very cost effective. 22 methods that are very cost effective. And something to think about is when you do introduce disease or when an a disease gets transmitted to your animals, it’s gonna cost you a lot. So where, do we wanna spend our costs?

Glenda Pereira: 25:29

You know, 9¢ per gallon for bleach or for a Virkon, it’s 72¢ per gallon or, you know, vet cost, treatment cost, decreased dry matter intake, decreased production and performance in our animals. So, you you know, it it does really help to prevent or try to prevent and minimize disease the introduction of disease as best as we can because those those later costs are gonna be substantially more costly down the line to our farm than implementing a, disinfectant and and boot wash and then point of entry on our farm. So this is Yeah. This is great to put the dollars and cents to it.

Carol Delaney: 26:15

Yeah. And I would say, say you feel like, well, I’m just raising it for myself. It doesn’t really it’s not hitting my profit line or something, but if you think of the labor that’s involved when you have a sick animal, it disrupts everything, it adds on. You’re spending like an hour a day probably with that one animal that’s sick, and what’s that worth to you? Plus so these are the very simple things you can do.

Carol Delaney: 26:37

You can identify who’s in charge. You can start writing down what you already do. You can put up signs. You can decide, okay, who’s the which animals are most vulnerable, and you can say no no entry at all. So I hope these these tips, these things, that we’ve talked about are not that hard, and you can just chip away at it.

Carol Delaney: 26:58

And I’m I’m also available to help you.

Glenda Pereira: 27:03

And then, Carol, I’ll finish our episode today with this question. But what do you foresee, as emerging biosecurity threats? And how can farmers try to best prepare for them?

Carol Delaney: 27:17

The animal health program is constantly being educated on what’s on the horizon or what’s here now. So a good source is to go to our animal health program, contact us. Your veterinarian should also be up on this. But right now, what we’re watching in this country is a new disease. It’s highly pathogenic avian influenza that has infected dairy cows.

Carol Delaney: 27:38

And we know it affects other mammals, but right now, it is spreading in different it’s in about 12, 13 states right now on dairy farms. We have not seen it in New England nor Maine. So that’s something to to stay on top of. We have a whole web page, the animal health program, just on this. And it they’re doing research all the time on, well, how does it spread?

Carol Delaney: 28:00

And, it actually does not spread as much by respiratory, exchange like in the birds, but it’s by milk. And and they’re still researching every day, so that’s a concern that milk is the way that it’s transmitted, raw milk. Worldwide, foot and mouth disease. That can be transmitted, by people and by food. Blue Tongue is in Europe, and that’s just a disease for cattle.

Carol Delaney: 28:29

But I just wanna say, the reason why we don’t have a lot of diseases is because the USDA and each state have your back. They have regulations, which farmers find arduous sometime and inconvenient, but this is preventing so many diseases from this country. It’s amazing. And it’s really what, USDA, animal and food inspection service is about and your state and health programs. I will end with this.

Carol Delaney: 28:56

African swine fever is around the world. It’s not a great disease. I mean, it’s not a mild disease. It’s it’s very painful for the animals and they die. So you do not want it.

Carol Delaney: 29:06

It’s in the Caribbean now, I think Dominican Republic, and each the US is doing major work in other countries on vaccines, stopping the spread. Wild animals, wild pigs can spread it. So that’s the one I would be concerned about if you have pigs and just keep up on that.

Glenda Pereira: 29:25

Yeah. Yeah. No. That this is, great to to be thinking about, and you’re right. At the end of the day, it is our responsibility to make sure that our food supply is safe, that we are trying to minimize disease because it’s keeping our animals safe and is keeping animal welfare and health at the forefront, of everything that we’re doing.

Glenda Pereira: 29:47

So with that, I appreciate the time that you, spent with us today in discussing this topic. And I know that you left listeners with a lot of takeaways and things to think about. And so I will I will share where folks can reach out to you and where they can find more information about the work that you’re currently working on. And I do wanna say thank you again.

Carol Delaney: 30:12

Oh, you’re welcome. It was my pleasure.

Colt Knight: 30:20

Howdy, folks. Dr. Knight here. The Maine Farmcast wants to hear from you. Please send us your questions, comments, or suggested episodes to extension.farmcast@maine.edu. Again, that is extension.farmcast@maine dot edu.

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