USDA Grant to Help Expand Usefulness of Swine Disease Reporting System

Jul 03, 2023

A three-year, one-million-dollar grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture will help expand the use of data collected through the Swine Disease Reporting System to identify disease trends and improve swine health.
The Swine Disease Reporting System was introduced to standardise the way that U.S. veterinary diagnostic labs report diagnostic test results and allow those results to be compiled, analysed and compared.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says USDA has allocated one million dollars to Iowa State University and the Swine Disease Reporting program over three years.

Quote-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
That money is going to go to helping to enhance the monitoring of the health and detect new diseases in the U.S. swine herd.
A portion of it is going to go to advanced genetic analysis, looking at the different strains of pathogens that come in, not just the pathogen test yes or no, but also genetically analysing those strains, those pathogens to see if we can detect occurrences of new strains or perhaps there is evolution and motion of strains that we currently have.
The second thing it will do is it will offer better regional information.
Currently we offer general state information and this is going to put some new tools in our SDS program to enable some better regional information coming.
This is important to the U.S. industry because we really operate multistate now.
It's not so much state by state but it is within regions and it's multistate so we're going to be able to mine that data for enhanced regional disease information.

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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.