U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to fund African Swine Fever dialogue

Sep 04, 2019

chayakorn lotongkum/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo

A U.S. Department of Agriculture grant will enable the U.S. pork sector to establish a dialogue in Asia aimed at building strategic partnerships to address African Swine Fever.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Animal Service division has allocated approximately 1.7 million dollars to start a dialogue between the United States and Vietnam to share veterinary knowledge and ways to prevent African Swine Fever from further spreading.

Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says the effort will move ahead as fast as possible.

With all of the questions about African Swine Fever circulating around the world, not being in the U.S., not being in Canada, there are a lot of issues with the virus, its epidemiology, how it acts in pigs, even the diagnostics, that you can necessarily answer by a group of five pigs or 20 pigs in an experimental pen.

This is an opportunity to go where the virus is circulating and study how it acts in actual production, in pig populations rather than in small groups. That was the genesis, to try to learn the lessons of African Swine Fever where it’s circulating rather than trying to only research it here in the U.S. and that’s the value of this.

The other value of the project is going to be to help the Vietnamese producers and the government to learn some lessons about African Swine Fever over there as well to help understand better pathways of entry for example, ways to control it, ways to clean and disinfect and repopulate. Those are all questions that are common to pork production whether you’re in Canada or whether you’re in the U.S.

~ Dr. Paul Sundberg, Swine Health Information Center

Click here to see more...

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.