Wean to Harvest Biosecurity to be Developed to Help Contain Swine Disease Movement

Sep 26, 2022

A planned Wean to Harvest Biosecurity program offers to help contain the spread of swine disease causing pathogens.The Swine Health Information Center, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research and the National Pork Board have partnered to set parameters for a new Wean to Harvest Biosecurity program.

SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says it has become clear that infected finishing floors, whether that's with PRRS, PED or it could be with the next emerging disease, can serve as a nidus of infection for the breeding herd.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:

We're working on three areas in this.One is the transportation biosecurity.We don't have the infrastructure necessary to be able to clean, disinfect and dry every trailer that comes from packing plants or first points of concentration before they go back to the farm.

So, we're looking for cost effective and innovative ways that we may be able to disinfect trailers and help to prevent transfer of pathogens from those first points of concentration to finishing floors, grow-finish sites, nurseries, those types of things.

The second area that we're focussed on is this idea of nurseries, grow to finish or finishing sites themselves.
In biosecurity we have two pathways that we have to pay attention to.One is bioexclusion.

Keeping disease off of the farm is bioexclusion, excluding them from on the farm themselves.Also, we want to investigate biocontainment.

That's the idea that, if you break with a disease on a site, if you're able to contain that disease on the site and prevent it from spreading to other sites, that will help to contain the disease and work its way out.

Dr. Sundberg says the objective is to develop a call for proposals that can be sent out in October.

Source : Farmscape.ca

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.