You’ve been hearing a lot lately about biosecurity and traceability because of foreign animal diseases impacting the livestock industry. That’s why there’s a tool called AgView that’s available for those in the pork industry.
“It’s an online platform that brings the capabilities of tracking movements of pigs,” says Chad Martin, Director of Strategic Outreach with Indiana Pork, talking about AgView. That platform is free for pork producers.
“It will allow us to identify where a pig individually, or as a group of pigs in a shipment, have been brought from, where they’re headed to thereafter, and how much time they’ve spent in all those different locations,” he says.
AgView is supported by the National Pork Board and funded by the Pork Checkoff.
With the busy show pig season underway, including the Indiana State Fair in August, Martin says the platform can provide real-time health status updates—plus site and pig movement data from participating farms to state animal health officials in the event that there’s a confirmed case of a foreign animal disease among swine in the U.S.
“If you think about the journey of a show pig from California, they may have stopped at a couple of different locations as a resting place and maybe co-mingled at a show here and there between then and getting to their final destination. If we can monitor those movements, we can be better able to understand where those disease pressures are located, where to contain those diseases, and then eventually, hopefully eradicate them before they spread,” says Martin.
The biggest concern among those in the pork industry, is that African Swine Fever is brought into the U.S.
“There’s a study that was recently conducted that says $79 billion of economic loss would be felt within the pork industry over a 10-year period if African Swine Fever were to infiltrate the country,” according to Martin. “What we need to do is to be proactive and understand measures how to contain that disease before it spreads to that magnitude.”
To learn more about the AgView platform, visit AgView.com.
