In the world of swine medicine, there are two ways to get pigs across the state lines for production purposes: a standard certificate of veterinary inspection, whether paper or electronic, or a swine production health plan.
“The swine production health plan is a process by which you basically predestine the movements of pigs from one state to the other when pigs are moving within a production system,” explains Patrick Webb, DVM, assistant chief veterinarian at the National Pork Board. “The challenge with these swine production health plans is that there’s at least eight signatures that you need to get approval for to complete these plans.”
From the sending state, signatures are needed from the state vet office, USDA’s area vets in charge, the person managing the site, the farm’s attending veterinarian, and basically the same line-up of people in the receiving state. This may not seem like a big deal, but that’s a lot of back and forth between spreadsheets and emails.
It’s not uncommon for this process, including revisions, to take 30 to 60 days to complete. Webb says there is now a better way for producers and veterinarians to handle this important and routine task.
“We rolled out our swine production health plan feature in AgView last year, and now we’re continuing to promote that and pilot that in different states,” Webb says.
AgView in Action
AgView, the National Pork Board’s voluntary traceability platform, is helping the entire pork industry be prepared in case of a foreign animal disease outbreak. Currently there are swine production health plans between Ohio and Minnesota. Webb is also working with production systems in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and hopefully into Iowa.
“The cool thing about it is AgView basically has a contained environment where everybody who’s part of the plan, whether they’re creating the plan, reviewing the plan, asking for revisions, approving them, monitoring them or receiving movements, all of that can be done in one spot so everybody can see what’s going on,” Webb explains. “They can see where the plan is in the approval process, and once it’s approved, they can see all the movements that are related to the plan.”
Not only is it a huge time save for these people, but it’s basically like a Teams chat that allows for more interaction, he says.
“The officials who have utilized it like it. It’s very simple and easy to use,” Webb says. “The fact that you’re getting real time movements is a benefit as well.”
Sara McReynolds, assistant animal health commissioner at the Kansas Department of Agriculture, has been using AgView recently as part of the pilot program to create swine production health plans. Not only is it more efficient, but it also makes information more readily available in one place.
“I can log into AgView and see those movements quickly,” she explains. “We are building a connection to our state database so that can message into our state database without having to manually upload that into our system. It’s going to make us efficient and hopefully help the swine producers.”
Not only will it cut down on extra emails and back and forth messages, but it can also help prevent data entry errors.
“Anytime you’re putting less hands on the data, you’re going to have less mistakes,” McReynolds adds.
No One Goes It Alone
Webb offers up support to everyone navigating AgView. He invites state veterinarians, production systems and all involved to take part in group meetings online to discuss how to use the system most effectively. However, he says the first group to set up a plan between two states did it flawlessly on their own.
“We think it’s intuitive and easy enough to do that everybody can understand it,” Webb says. “Of course, we demonstrate it for each state, just so they know what it’s supposed to do.”
State animal officials care about obtaining up-to-date information when it comes to animal movement data.
“We have over 2 million movements in AgView that have been put in there over the last three years,” Webb says. “That’s great. However, state vets are like, ‘That’s fine and dandy, but what did you do last week?’ We’re at around 20,000 movements a week going into AgView. We have close to 37% of the Top 40 pork producers getting their data into AgView on a daily or weekly basis. We’re also tracking feed movements, semen movements, etc. All of this stuff is about maintaining current data.”
During a typical investigation today, McReynolds says their quickest response to contain a disease is to figure out where all those exposed animals have gone. In order to do that, she must go into their database and look up certificates of veterinary inspection records and movement records, such as through the swine production health plan records.
“We have to trace those animals as quickly as possible to try to stop further spread of that disease,” she says. “Waiting for producers to request those records when we’re already busy trying to contain an outbreak is going to slow us down and we’re going to get behind it. Having accurate records to be able to quickly contain an outbreak is really essential for my job to stop the spread of diseases.”
Webb says these records are powerful tools for decisionmakers in an outbreak scenario. They need up-to-date data in a one-stop shop.
“A lack of information delays decisions,” Webb says. “Delayed decisions means we’re not moving pigs.”
He’s optimistic about the growth AgView will see this year. The early adopters are in and they are pursuing the middle part of the bell curve where it takes multiple touches and conversations, there’s not a lot of resistance against AgView, it’s the time that it takes to go through the process of getting it set up and understanding how you get your data in.
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