Once upon a time, after I quit my engineering job in Marikina and moved back home to the province, I used to run a backyard piggery. I picked it because I thought it would be doable, and after a seminar with the Technical Livelihood Resource Center, I invested my savings into a 12-sow operation in Silay City that could be considered backyard in scale.
It was during my pig raising days that I understood why they call it a piggy bank. Hog raisers continuously put money into the business, paying for the stock, the feeds and meds, in the hope that when the time to sell comes, there will be a decent profit to be made. The crux of this forced-savings business model is making sure that the hogs that you are raising survive until the end, when they are either sold as piglets to be raised by other raisers, or to be slaughtered for meat.
If you come to think of it, a backyard piggery is a very effective way of forcing a family to save/invest money. Of course, they can put cash under their mattresses or in a bank account every week, but such easily accessible funds usually end up being spent whenever the need or want arises. However, if the money is being plowed into a pig, being spent on feeds and meds to fatten it up so it can be sold for a good price at the market, then that money cannot be easily spent. But of course, that kind of investment also comes with its risks.
One of the things that was always emphasized as I was piggering was the importance of biosecurity. Anyone who intended to be serious in raising swine had to take it seriously. That is why if you are ever allowed into a proper piggery, there are always footbaths and wheel washing for vehicles upon entry, and everyone is made to don rubber boots, face masks, and gowns, especially when coming in contact with the swine. This is important because if the biosecurity is breached and a virus, such as hog cholera or the deadly African Swine Flu, it could mean the end of the entire whole operation, costing millions of pesos.
Backyard raisers do not have the same biosecurity priorities as commercial farms, but if you come to think of it, especially in terms of relative financial impact, it should be just as important. A family that has invested tens of thousands into a couple of piglets they are fattening for eventual sale will feel the same financial pain as a commercial farm that has invested millions in hundreds of heads if something goes terribly wrong. In both cases, extreme financial difficulty is entirely possible if biosecurity is not prioritized and the hogs you were counting on to be converted to cash suddenly die and have to be buried, and in the case of an ASF infection, mass culling is required.
The biosecurity of a backyard piggery is notoriously lax. Anyone, who came from anywhere, can come into contact with the hogs without being required to undergo any disinfection. Most backyard piggeries employ gigolo boars to impregnate their sow, which is one of the biggest no-no’s in biosecurity. These boars, who hop from sow to sow with the sole purpose of copulating, can pick up all sorts of pathogens and disease and spread it around. Artificial insemination would be a safer way to do it, at almost the same cost, but I guess there is something about seeing two pigs go at it the natural way that is more satisfying for backyard growers. That should be a lesson that they should learn after these past few weeks of hog mortalities in the province that has already killed more than 5,000 heads and caused more than P77 million in losses, mostly to backyard growers whose savings have been devastated.
If you come to think of it, our government officials responsible should’ve been preparing our backyard hog industry for this by preaching the tenets of biosecurity, especially as the threat of ASF loomed larger and larger in recent months. After all, just because we were able to successfully fend off the ASF virus for more than 3 years, it didn’t mean our borders were impregnable. I know it was virtually impossible to continue fending it off, especially after almost all neighboring provinces had already been struck by the virus, but one can’t help but wonder how big of a role hubris played in ASF finally getting through.
The hog cholera outbreak that preceded the confirmation of ASF in Bacolod was already an indication of poor biosecurity among the affected backyard growers. Almost 5,000 heads have already died due to it, and there is no mass culling involved yet. Once ASF takes hold here, which is very likely given the state of biosecurity within our borders, that mortality rate is going to be much higher because mass cullings will be necessary.
At this point we can only hope that we can still beat back ASF and regain our ASF-free status. But even if we cannot, we have to start doing what we should’ve done 3 years ago, when ASF was first declared, where government and the private sector should’ve worked together to improve the biosecurity of the backyard piggery industry that so many people have been using as a piggy bank for their hopes and dreams.*
