MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 All right, Good evening everybody and welcome to the Michigan Ag Ideas virtual conference. My name is Beth Ferry and I'm a pork educator based in Berrien County. Today it's my pleasure to talk to you about secure pork supply, and African swine fever. Before we get started, we also want to make sure that we thank our sponsors, SARE and Greenstone, due to their generous  support, we are able to offer this event at no charge to our participants. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to jump right in to some of our prep, to our presentation. And once again, we're talking about secure pork supply and African swine fever. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit. What is your farms role insecure pork supply. Secure pork supply is a continuity of business plan. This is a volunteer opportunity for producers to come involved in preparedness for foreign animal disease outbreak. And it's supported by the National Pork Board. It's also supported and regulated by our state agencies, specifically the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. And it also has oversight from USDA, APHIS. And why are we concerned about this? While the three major foreign animal diseases that we're concerned about, are African swine fever, classical swine fever, and foot and mouth. And most recently our biggest concern in the pork industry is African swine fever. African swine fever is a disease that we have seen move across China and throughout the European nations over the last few years. And over the summer, we saw an outbreak of ASF, or African swine fever in the Dominican Republic. So now there isn't an ocean between us and this disease. Secure pork supply is a plan that's been put together with support from the National Pork Board that suggests different biosecurity practices that will help protect your farm from the exposure of this disease to your animals. It provides some guidelines for moving and processing animals. And it also helps us if we move to a movement permit system, if we are having outbreaks across the states. What they've done with secure pork supply is they've tried to provide a format in which businesses can continue to operate even during a foreign animal disease outbreak. You can find more information specifically about secure pork supply at www.securepork.org. When we talk about secure pork supply, we want to talk about why this is important to the pork industry. Foreign animal diseases are reportable and they're also monitored by the World Organization for Animal Health. The reason for this is because those foreign animal diseases are highly impactful to production animals. There's also rapid spread regardless of borders of these diseases. And if we do break with one of our foreign animal diseases, specifically ASF, there would be a halt to all movement of animals from that infected industry for ASF, of course, that is swine, these different diseases impact trade of animals, animal products for us. And so an outbreak of ASF would immediately stop all US meat exports for our industry. And it's undetermined how long those closures would be in effect. And the expectation is that they would be in effect for an extended amount of time. How does that impact us and why should we be concerned about our trade markets and about our exports? Well, interestingly enough, about 26 percent of the pigs raised here in the United States, our exported out to other countries. That's 1.5 pigs out of every five that is raised here that we're selling to our export markets. Additionally, that equals about $5.89 billion of pork and pork products that we're sending overseas. When we think about that, and we think about the jobs that are supported by our pork exports, we can equate that to just over a 100 thousand different jobs that are involved with our pork exports. And finally, specifically for our producers. For every pig that we do sell because of our export markets, we're adding  value that's approximately $53. That's a lot of money per pig as we're marketing them and have those export industries available. Why is this impactful for us? We're dependent on those experts for the price of pigs and also to have a place for animals to go. But if we break with a foreign animal disease here in the United States, those exports once again will be halted immediately. They're going to stop. And this is going to have a domino effect on our local markets are processors and our farmers. Because we all know that just because we can't market our pigs doesn't mean that they're going to stop growing. If we do break, what's going to happen here in the United States is that the USDA will have oversight over the outbreak. They'll work with the state where the outbreak is identified, to identify the infection, to see where the reach or spread was and to immediately stamp it out. How are they going to do that? Well, USDA has already told us that if we break with a foreign animal disease, specifically ASF here in the United States, they're going to have a 72 hour minimum stop movement order for all pigs across the United States. That means even if we break in Colorado with ASF, movement here in Michigan will stop. Any scheduled loads that you have, any movement of pigs between farms will not be allowed. The USDA says plan on 72 hours. As I think about this, and I think about what is actually reachable and doable. If I was a producer and I had pigs, I would be expecting more. I would plan for a ten-day to a two-week stop movement on all animals are stopped. You we know the animals for sure will stop. But movement between farms of equipment and vehicles and manure may also stop. There's also potential for feed to stop movement, or at least for feed to come onto the farm to care for our animals. But those trucks have to stay there or be disinfected before they leave. How are we going to make this happen and how does the USDA plan to enforce that? Well, they're going to involve local and state level law enforcements. And there are already rules and regulations through the State of Michigan that make the penalties enforceable for this. So there could be fines. There could be penalties like misdemeanors or even felonies if people are caught moving animals. So it's definitely a concern and something that we need to watch and something that we need to take into consideration. As we talk about a foreign animal disease outbreak in Michigan, let's talk about what will happen. You may just, excuse me, the infected farm, once identified, will be quarantined, which means absolutely no movement of that farm. The USDA will come in as will the state. And they will work to depopulate that farm. They'll also work with that farmer to see the reach of the spread and look at all movement and traceability for that farm to determine if animals have moved on or off and where other potential farms could be infected. The State will  come in, and they will establish a control area. And that control area is a surveillance area. Where they will be looking for more and more infected farms. So the first area that's going to be established will be about a five-mile radius. They'll see, as you can see here on the screen, you'll have your infected farm around that will be the infected zone where all the animals in that zone will need to be tested before they'll be able to move. Additionally, they'll have a buffer zone where there'll be doing more surveillance on the farms that are identified in those zones. And then they'll have a surveillance area where they're watching those farms for signs of sickness. And perhaps doing diagnostic work to determine if there's any spread of disease outside of this area. But if you are in one of these control areas, you can expect that the movement on and off your farm of animals and potentially things like equipment or manure will also stop. Let's look at a real-time example. This is an example of a few farms here in Michigan and you can see how close they are when we have an outbreak case or an outbreak farm, like farm 4, that farm is identified and then we establish our control area around that farm. Within that control area, we will look for and we'll find all farms with pigs in that area. Once we do find those, will complete diagnostic work for those farms to determine if they're positive or negative. There's also a potential, even though that farm may not be exhibiting clinical signs, that they could also have to be depopulated just because of risk of spread. As we're doing our diagnostic work, if we do identify a secondary case, we're going to expand our control zone, make it even bigger, or maybe make an additional one. And we're going to look for more and more farms. And you can see as we continue to identify, identify farms, we're going to expand that controls zone out. And please note that if your farm falls in one of those control zones, you're going to be under a quarantine and not able to move your animals. It doesn't matter if we need to move them to a new site or if we need to move them to market, they're going to be held at your facility until the state deems it's okay to move those animals. If we get to this point or if we get to a point where we need to permit the movement of all the animals in the state or all animals are infected species. We will move into a system where you have to apply for a permit before you can move your animals. That permit will go through MDARD or the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. They will require traceability information for your farm, meaning that you need to have a premise identification number. That premise identification number must be associated with the GPS coordinates of your farm, the address of your farm, and include information on the type and number of animals or quantity of semen to be moved from your farm. Also, if you're applying for a permit, you're going to want to have no clinical signs for those animals. And that needs to be supported by diagnostic information that you have done at a lab. And then we need to make sure that the destination premise and state, if we're moving them out of state, are willing to accept those animals or semen as we're moving it. And those states will have to give us the okay before we're allowed to move those animals. It's the same thing for anything coming into Michigan. If you wish to move pigs into Michigan, the state is going to have to approve that before you can move those animals, if we're in a time of permitted movement. The final thing that we'll have to do to be able to permit you to move, is that you're going to have to make sure that your biosecurity measures are in place and that they're acceptable to our responsible regulatory officials. And that's the people at MDARD They're going to want to approve and look at your enhanced biosecurity plan before they permit you to move, to make sure that there's not the risks that you've been spreading this disease to other sites. The roles that you have in secure pork supply planning is building that enhanced biosecurity plan. And that's why secure pork has been created. To give you a guide as to how to build that plan. You will develop and then validate that enhanced biosecurity plan for your farm. And remember, it's very important that you do that through your herd veterinarian. As we move our farms through the permitting process, and as we try to pre-approve farms for permitted movement, there's  going to want to be a point where your herd veterinarian signs off on your biosecurity plan. So it's important to have a veterinarian that you're working with that has those capabilities. Additionally, as you're building your enhanced biosecurity plan with those different practices that we work to protect our animals from the spread of disease. We're going to want a biosecurity manager for each site. If you have multiple sites, you may have one biosecurity manager for all of those sites. If you have an independent location and an independent site, you may be the owner operator and also the biosecurity manager for your site. But it's important that that person is identified. In the case of multiple sites, we'll want multiple people or a secondary biosecurity manager identified for each of those sites also. In addition to your enhanced biosecurity practices that you're going to create through your secure ports supply plan, they'll also want sitemaps for each of your locations. And this is specific to your premise number. So for every premise number you have for that site, you're going to have to have that site mapped out on those site maps we're going to want to have identified the PBA or perimeter buffer area and the line of separation or LLS. Additionally, they're going to want to have the traffic patterns identified for those farms. These are some examples of how people have gone ahead and created their premise maps are a lot of times farmers just grab those maps off of Google Maps and they draw in the lines themselves. That's perfectly acceptable. Other farms have gone a different direction and created more formalized maps. But the important thing to know is that when you are looking at these maps and creating them, you have to identify a number of certain things. That includes your perimeter buffer area, or the area around the farm where you're going to limit traffic coming into your farm. You're also going to want to identify those PBA, perimeter buffer area, access points where are the driveways that allow for the traffic to come into that site. You're going to want to identify the line of separation. The LOS is the point between where people can have access to your animals. There are times when the PBA and LOS specifically in pasture operations are almost exactly the same. Now there are other times such as the example on the left where those are slightly different. The LOS access points or the doors to your facility will also need to be identified on your map. Additionally, we're going to want to have a vehicle C and D station, or a cleaning and disinfection station. If we do break with a foreign animal disease before we bring any type of vehicle including feed trucks, manure, equipment, or our daily vehicles onto the farm. They're going to want to make sure that those are clean and disinfected. There are many different opportunities to do this and we're building some educational resources that will talk about this. But it may be as simple as a backpack sprayer and cleaning the wheel wells of your car with disinfectant. Additionally, we'll want to identify a parking area where our carcass disposal and pick up is. The path that that vehicle will traveled to complete the carcass pick up. And additionally, manure. We have manure trucks coming in or feed trucks coming in. What are the traffic paths for those vehicles? Those are all things that we need on most premise maps as we keep thinking about how to develop those. Luckily, at MSU Extension, we have people that are willing and happy to help you create those mapping materials. And you can reach out for us for assistance with that, with that project. Additionally, as we start to think about being prepared for secure pork supply and foreign animal disease outbreaks. One of the things that farms will need to be able to do, its complete traceability on their farm. Traceability will be requested by the state. And we want to talk about that a whole farm traceability. Where we're able to know exactly what comes on and what comes off of our farm. If you are looking to be able to move your pigs and we are under permitted system, you will have to have diagnostics that support your pigs and the fact that they are healthy and negative for any diseases. Some of those samples can be submitted to the MSU VDL or Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. In the case of an outbreak situation, this might be the most likely place that we're going to submit our samples because we will not have foreign animal disease. Presumptive positive samples crossing state lines. You'll also want to provide and document any biosecurity training that you do on your farm. And that should be done on an annual basis. And then finally, you'll have to create that enhanced biosecurity plan and submit that through the RAP App. And once again, we have a lot of people at MSU Extension that are knowledgeable and willing to help producers go through this process as they work to create their preparedness and build their secure pork supply plan. I want to stop a minute and go back to whole farm traceability and documentation. It says this is going to be key if we do break with a, with a disease outbreak. And these are some of the things that farms are going to want. Records will need to be maintained and available at the request of MDARD for permits to happen or if your farm does break with the disease? If you have a central dispatch system where you have a number of sites that you're working with. This can be maintained at a central location. And these different records should include animal movement, including semen and anything that moves across the LOS additionally, feed and manure. And then if you do have a specific site that you're in charge of, you're going to want to have records that include all of the vehicles and equipment movements by date and time, on some type of record keeping system and documented. Examples of different things that need to be documented. The mortality that you have on your farm. Any visitors who come to your site, trash pickup, propane deliveries, any deliveries from UPS of supplies, and repair visits. All of those need to be documented with dates and times so that we can refer to those. And the state will ask you to do a 30-day traceability exercise to figure out exactly who has been on your farm and where they went. Just to make sure that we haven't spread disease anywhere else. As you can see, this is a lot of work, but most of our farms know exactly what's happening. We just need to be able to document it and write it down. So especially specific things like trash or propane deliveries, those happen on a weekly basis or monthly basis. And that's really easy to capture. We just need to make sure that we have it written down somewhere so we can share that documentation with the State. I want to give you some examples of enhanced biosecurity as people are creating their different plans. One of the specific focuses of enhanced biosecurity is the site entry. When we talk about site entry, we want to make sure that our perimeter buffer area, our entry points. So the driveway where we're coming into our farms, it's protected with a gate or suitable barrier, like a chain across two poles. Or maybe we have a fence around our facilities. Also, we want to make sure that we have signage at our sites that convey that this area has restricted access. Michigan Pork Producers Association has some available signage for producers that there happy to share and to mail out to you if that's something that you need. Also, when we think about enhanced biosecurity, we want to have designated parking areas outside of the PBA or perimeter buffer area away from the animal areas where vehicles could park. And as we think about bringing people across or into the PBA, this may be a feed truck driver who's getting out to open up your bins. As they do that may park their trucks. The truck might be set outside of the PBA, but the driver may have to enter that PBA. If they do enter a PBA, we're going to want them to put on clean and disinfected footwear or have new disposable footwear and disposable gloves as they cross into the PBA when they leave their vehicles. And think about your  manure haulers, your propane or your gas delivery drivers. If they move into the PBA, they need to have disposable footwear or clean disinfected footwear to do that. They should also have hand sanitizer or gloves so that they can clean or sanitize their hands before they enter into the PBA. Those are things that we should be doing on our farm. And in case of enhanced biosecurity, things that will be required of your farm. Let's talk a minute about LOS, or line of separation. This is also has some big components. in secure pork supply and enhanced biosecurity. When we have people entering the LOS, which means they have access to our animals, we want to have a signed agreement on file saying that they're going to follow the biosecurity practices that we have in place. And this should include a change of foot, footwear and clothing. You may not have a shower facility available but that person should be putting on disposable cover wear coveralls and disposable footwear before they enter the LOS? No animals from a control area, one that's been identified to have an actual foreign animal disease infection should be introduced to a site for at least seven days prior to moving any other animals. And then they do recommend that if we do have a barn or an indoor facility, that we have a bent bench entry system. A lot of people identify this as a Danish entry system where the people that are coming into the farm would leave their shoes on one side of the bench, swing their feet across this you can see in the picture and put on dedicated footwear for the facility. And then we also want to talk about not having food crossing the LOS or having containers that can be cleaned and disinfected if an employee's bringing lunch across. Personal items such as cell phones or other electronic, should also need to be clean and disinfected when they cross into the LOS and all equipment that's coming into the LOS, specifically equipment that's shared across farms will need to be disinfected with either heat, chemical disinfectant fumigation, or ultraviolet light before it crosses the LOS. This is just to ensure that we're not bringing any disease into our farm from the farm with that equipment would have been at prior to. While we look at secure pork supply as a business continuity plan and being prepared, one of the other things that we need from producers and farmers is for them to be able to quickly identify and report any concerns about foreign animal diseases. In doing this, we need your eyes out in the farm. We need you to be able to watch for clinical signs of ASF. And we're going to take a few minutes here to share some pictures of clinical signs from ASF that we've gathered from infected farms. Some of the clinical signs include an elevated temperature of your pigs. There will be some fevers going on. There will be an increase of mortality. And sometimes this is one of the biggest signs and quickest signs because you will see a number of pigs that die when we have an outbreak of, of ASF. Abortions may also have an uptick. You'll see pigs cold and piling, and you'll see cases of diarrhea. We move on and start to look at some more pictures you'll start to see some lesions on the snout area, vesicles around the foot bands. And you'll also see some on teats. Those are things to look at. If you see things that look like this, this would be something that you need to contact your veterinarian or contact MDARD right away. Because these are concerns for a number of foreign animal diseases. Other things that you may see are lesions on pigs. And these are some good examples of lesions that we've seen. Matting, runny eyes. And then you'll see some reddening of areas specifically in the extremities like the ears. The problem with this and all of these different clinical signs is that a lot of times this kinda looks like  a lot of different diseases. This may be PURVs. It could be Seneca Valley virus, but we need to not be complacent. And we do, when we do see signs like these, especially when they are associated with increased mortality on your farm. That's when a phone call to your herd veterinarian. Or if you're not working specifically with the veterinarian, MDARD may need to happen. That way. We can quickly identify if there actually is a concern for foreign animal disease or ASF. Then we can close down the farm, stamp out that disease and not spread it to the rest of our state or our industry so that we can impact our export markets and still can maintain that business continuity. That was just a quick overall of secure pork supply and some signs of ASF. I'm happy to answer questions from anyone. And I'll also go ahead and put my e-mail in the chat if anyone is interested in contacting me further for more help, that'd be great and happy to talk to everybody. Finally, we do have a quick survey that we would ask our attendees to quickly log on and answer that I just put the mess, the survey link in the chat. If you were listening and had a moment to go ahead and listen to answer those questions on that survey. It's really quick. We would greatly appreciate some in some information. And if anybody wants more information, I'd invite you to go ahead, shoot me an email and let's continue this conversation. There's a lot of things that we can do at MSU Extension to help you with your preparedness and your secure pork supply plants.