Bart Engels: "We want our animals to have a good life there, and good health is fundamental to this. “As long as we’ve got our health” people always say. And it’s no different for pigs.

Pigs can also catch influenza, become infected, and pandemics are also on the cards. Like we now have COVID-19 among people, African swine fever broke out among wild pigs several years ago. Pigs across the whole world were contaminated, both wild and tame. Wild pigs died in their masses. The tame pigs were slaughtered to prevent further contamination – we absolutely wanted to avoid that."

"Fortunately not all diseases are so serious and we have vaccines for many of them. But the animals can still become sick if disease levels are too high or if there is no vaccine.

We can often remedy bacterial infections using antibiotics but we do prefer not to use them. The more antibiotics we use the higher the risk that they will no longer be effective in the future, in people and animals alike.

Treatment also costs money, with a lot of time needed to nurse sick animals on top. However you look at it, we must make sure that our animals do not become sick."

Bart Engels: "Shoes and coats must be immediately removed when coming in through the front door. We then pass through a walk-through shower consisting of three parts. The first part is to remove your own clothing and put it in a locker. In the second compartment you wash yourself completely in a shower with disinfecting soap. In the third part there are towels and clothing from the farm. These are washed in the sty itself. This means the material can bring nothing in from outside. When a properly washed person comes out of the shower with our clothing, the likelihood is extremely small that the person will still be carrying pathogens."

"After showering we ask people to wash and disinfect their hands. With the hand disinfection system (HDK) with turnstile from BOONS FIS you cannot enter the sty without disinfecting the hands. I see some people already thinking “we’ve only just come out of the shower?!”. But we also have a personnel kitchen and an office here. Employees sometimes go back there to eat, take a break or update software, for example. At such times they come into contact with items from outside, so washing and disinfecting the hands again is necessary."

"The next step is putting boots and overalls on. As you can see they are nicely hung up. This is tidily organised and encourages keeping everything clean. We keep the boots clean with a boot washer (SRS). Highly recommended! No one likes taking dirty boots off and hanging them up, let alone taking dirty boots off the rack and putting them on in the morning! 
It is not only comfortable - washed boots also have many fewer pathogens on them. Hang them up tidily to dry out and many more germs sticking to the boots will die. In so doing we work on preventing diseases that are already in the sty from spreading between the pigs. Everything has been thought of!"