2017

Industry Profiles: Gustavo De Sousa E Silva

THIS IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY STUDENT USES PIGCHAMP SOFTWARE IN HIS RESEARCH ON PRRSV.

By Schae Greenzweig

At PigCHAMP, we have the honor to work with producers who raise pigs for a variety of different areas of the pork industry. One such producer is Gustavo de Sousa e Silva, a research scholar in the Department of Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University (ISU). He has worked on several swine-related research projects using PigCHAMP software during his time at ISU and agreed to share some of the details with us.

Gustavo de Sousa e Silva

  1. Tell us about yourself and your involvement with Iowa State University.
    I am a PhD student from Brazil. I have been working with Dr. Derald Holtkamp and Dr. Daniel Linhares since March 2016 at ISU. My PhD is in Veterinary Epidemiology and my foci are disease economics and applied statistical methods to help producers make evidence-based decisions on disease prevention and control.

  2. How did you get started doing research with ISU?
    Dr. Daniel Linhares is on my PhD committee and invited me last year to join his team at ISU. He offered me a sponsorship to work part-time for him and part-time for Dr. Holtkamp on a project to update the cost of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) in the United States swine industry.

  3. Tell us about the swine research project(s) you’ve worked on.
    At ISU I have been working with:
    • Monitoring and updating the value of Gustavo de Sousa e Silva (left) and Dr. Daniel Linhares (right) productivity losses due to PRRSV in the U.S. swine industry,

    • Developing a scoring system to quantify the relationship between biosecurity practices and frequency of PRRS outbreaks, and

    • Using continuous monitoring of production data to detect disease outbreaks early.

  4. How long have you been using PigCHAMP and why did you select this software?
    I am not a daily PigCHAMP user. But we must know how to work with PigCHAMP because some of the herds that we work in collaboration with use this software to manage their production sites.

  5. In what ways is PigCHAMP necessary to the work you do for ISU?
    PigCHAMP software has a user-friendly format and, in our work, we need to gather data in a secure and reliable format. PigCHAMP fits this criteria for us.

  6. What would you say to others who are considering using PigCHAMP?
    PigCHAMP is a secure and straightforward way to manage and evaluate performance on production sites. Beyond this, you can use PigCHAMP software for benchmarking purposes and to support you in making better decisions.