FREE CONTENT: Bryan Barbour’s phone buzzed at 6 in the morning on June 21, 2013. Marty Lassiter was calling from the Quinn Sow Farm, a collection of eight barns off Friendship Church Road near the town of Faison, North Carolina. The piglets were in trouble. Barbour jumped in his truck and drove to the farm. He stopped at the barn door. “It was something I’d never seen,” said Barbour, who has worked on farms Down East for 20 years. The baby pigs were vomiting. They were overcome with diarrhea. Many were dead. “A smell like you’ve never smelled,” Barbour said. Just days before, Lassiter and Barbour had heard about a virus that was hurting swine farms in other states. Now they were looking at North Carolina’s first case of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, or PED, a foreign invader believed to have started in China. It was spreading to piglets from barn to barn at the Quinn complex, “like a wildfire from spot to spot,” Lassiter said. One farmhand broke down in tears. By the end of the day, about 900 piglets once destined for Japan had died. During the next month, the farm lost more than 5,000. Over the next year, the virus would kill millions of piglets across the country, driving up pork prices and scrambling an industry built to churn out loins, ribs, hams and bellies for markets here and around the world.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 01:00:10 +0000
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