Resource person along with officials and participants during the campus awareness programme at NU: SAS, Medziphema on September 2. (Morung Photo)
Morung Express News
Medziphema | September 2
A one-day campus awareness on hands on pig farming was organised by ICAR- AICRP on Pig, Nagaland Centre, Department of Livestock Production Management, at Nagaland University, School of Agricultural Sciences, Medziphema campus on September 2.
Speaking as a resource person, Dr Joshua Kath shared concerns over rampant occurrence of diseases in pigs like Diamond skin disease, Swine fever, African swine fever, Porcine Reproductive and respiratory syndrome diseases. He highlighted common diseases in pig in context to North East states and particularly in Nagaland and explained the need to understand the diseases and prevent them in all possible ways.
Although diseases like Diamond Skin Disease, Swine Fever, African Swine Fever, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome are occurring and spreading rapidly, Dr Kath opined that “mass culling was not practiced” and was a reason to give more way to further contamination.
He said the mode of transmission was through direct contact with infected pigs, secretions, excretions and through contaminated food products. Some measures that Dr Kath mentioned were segregating infected pigs, proper disposal of carcasses, and enforcing bio-security protocols on farms which were necessary and critical steps to curbing diseases resurgence, and bio-security maintenance at pig farm to prevent the introduction of infectious disease like African Swine Fever.
Further, he also spoke on the topics of prevention and control of pig diseases and farm practical demonstration.
In the second session, Dr V Rutsa spoke on the piggery NER and economics of pig production including the various government and schemes which could be availed and farm practical demonstration was also displayed.
Dr Rutsa said that with the massive piggery scope in the NE Region that the requirement in the NE states were 1232.27 thousand metric tonnes with value of 36.968 crore. However, the availability was only 80.75 TMT and value of 2,250.
He said that 715 million people were involved in agriculture with the addition of 850 million working in the process from production to the table product.
Dr Rutsa said that as per the latest livestock census, there was about 9.06 million livestock in the country, with state of Assam leading (2.1 million), Meghalaya (0.7 million), Nagaland (0.4 million) and Mizoram (0.29 million).
The welcome address was as delivered by training incharge, ICAR-AICRP on pig, Dr M. Catherine and exhortation by Head of Department, Professor, Dr Nizamuddin. The participants were imparted hand-on training on scientific pig farming including housing management, nutrition management, disease management, bio-security and waste management.
