USDA Announces $3 Million in Funding Opportunities for Antimicrobial Resistance Dashboard Development

Dec 01, 2022

The United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is making up to $3 million in cooperative agreement funding available to create antimicrobial resistance dashboards. Addressing AMR is important to APHIS, along with the agricultural and public health sectors, because antimicrobials are some of our most critical tools for treating serious infections and saving the lives of people and animals.

These dashboard tools, developed through public-private partnerships, will be used to improve access to information on antimicrobial resistance in domesticated animals. "Public-private partnerships are an essential part of achieving our goals at APHIS," said Administrator Kevin Shea. "The dashboard tools developed through these cooperative agreements will help us better understand antimicrobial resistance in livestock, poultry, and companion animals, which ultimately helps protect public health."

Once created, the antimicrobial resistance dashboards will be used to monitor trends in antimicrobial resistance patterns, detect emerging resistance profiles, and better understand relationships between antimicrobial use and animal health management practices and antimicrobial resistance. The projects will support APHIS' goals of:

Developing antimicrobial resistance dashboard tools that can securely track the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistant microbes in domesticated animals.
Identifying and/or developing methods for protecting data confidentiality of these dashboards.

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Video: Selling Hay for 40 Years: Fritz Trauttmansdorff, Dunlea Farms

Fritz Trauttmansdorff came to Canada from Austria in 1980, bought a 45-cow dairy farm at Jerseyville, and within two years had more hay than he knew what to do with. He sold the quota in 1986, went debt-free, and built a hay business that has kept some of the same customers for forty years. Today Dunlea Farms runs about 2,500 acres — roughly 600 of it hay, the rest IP soybeans and grain corn — and Fritz makes the case that hay isn't the crop you grow when grain doesn't work. It's the crop that makes the grain work.

"If you grow corn, soybeans and wheat, you're on a three-wheeler. If you put hay in the rotation, you're on a four-wheeler."

WHAT WE COVER • Why the hay market moves independently of the Chicago Board — and what that does for farm-level risk
• The real cost of a mistake: five bushels in grain, versus the whole crop in hay
• Getting a second job out of the same iron — planting tractors that mow all summer, tillage tractors that bale
• How a grain farmer can get hay into the rotation without buying a single piece of hay equipment
• Drilling Timothy in the fall and double-cropping soybeans into it the next June
• What it actually takes to go all-in: roughly 500 acres, good sheds, and a baler you didn't buy used
• Local, regional and international hay markets — and choosing which one you're building for
• Why 40-year customer relationships are the asset, not the equipment