To assess the survivability and infectivity of the virus responsible for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, engineers with the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute collected manure samples from various depths of the earthen manure storages on three PED infected Manitoba farms and researchers with the Department of Animal Science at the University of Manitoba then analyzed those samples to determine how long the virus could survive under Manitoba conditions.

MLMMI executive director John Carney told Manitoba Pork's Fall Producer Meetings last week the study began in 2014 and was recently concluded in 2015.

John Carney-Livestock Manure Management Imitative:

We knew from some work that had been done in Minnesota by Sagar Goyal that the virus survived longer in cold conditions and that it liked wet conditions.

Sagar Goyal's work proved that it lived at least 28 days in cold conditions and what we found was that unfortunately this virus is capable of surviving over winter in Manitoba earthen manure storages which is a concern to the industry that this bug is that hardy that even living through minus 30 winters in our province doesn't kill it so this is one tough bug.

The other thing is Sagar's work was done in a laboratory and you're always curious, in a real world setting on a working farm, are there differences of how things happen between that situation and a lab and so we were able to take it from a lab setting out to working farms.

Mr Carney says these findings suggest, when a farm is PED positive, the first line of defense is to kill the virus in the pits under the barn rather than releasing it into the earthen Manure storage.