PRIMGHAR, Iowa — Pork producers are being asked to start thinking about a Secure Pork Supply Plan. The general idea for the plan is emergency preparedness. A foreign swine disease infecting pigs somewhere in the United States could dramatically slow export trade and trigger a stop of all livestock movements. Areas that are close to an infected herd will be called a control area. Movement of swine in or out of the control area will be impossible without approval. The Secure Pork Plan is a document that pork producers can voluntarily develop to help them get movement approval during a foreign disease outbreak.
If a foreign disease, such as African Swine Fever, crosses the ocean to infect our pigs, then having a plan ready in advance will benefit individual producers and the entire swine industry. In Northwest Iowa, over 50,000 jobs are supported by the swine industry. Thus, if a foreign disease ever infected our pigs, it is important to keep swine production in this part of the state with the help of a Secure Pork Supply Plan.
To participate in the Secure Pork Supply Plan, local swine producers should prepare prior to an outbreak. That involves obtaining a national premises identification number, implementing enhanced biosecurity, designating a person to conduct surveillance and sampling, and maintaining movement records. There is a self-assessment checklist for enhanced pork production biosecurity, and a template available for swine producers to use to develop their own site specific Secure Pork Supply Plan. More information, the biosecurity checklist and the plan template can be found at www.securepork.org.
Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, in partnership with the Iowa Pork Industry Center and Iowa Pork Producers Association, is offering educational workshops to help producers. First, there are biosecurity workshops which offer materials that will be useful to help producers write their farm specific Secure Pork Supply Plan. Secondly, workshops will be developed to help producers develop and implement that same plan.
The biosecurity programs offered for swine producers will teach new ideas to help reduce disease risk. The workshop emphasis will be training on risk events, focusing on employee entry. Biosecurity at the farm entrance is an important management step in protecting against disease. One real example during the workshop will show how risks can be substantially reduced. In that example, the implementation of one extra biosecurity step reduced the risk from breaking every other year to once in four hundred years.
When the foreign disease called Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea came to this country from China, it spread all over the swine industry in a few months. We have learned some new things about biosecurity since then and have more optimism that good biosecurity implementation can be an important tool to slow and stop disease spread.
Check with your local county ISU Extension and Outreach office for hands-on biosecurity workshops near you.
— Dave Stender, Swine Specialist, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach
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