Disease is one of the unfair players in the pork industry, explains Scott Hays, executive director of the Missouri Pork Association. Too many times, “disease” picks the winners and losers in this industry.
“It’s going to take all of us in the industry to figure this out and to move the needle in the right direction,” Hays says. “We’ve just come out of a really tough time. But for producers who survived 2023 and 2024, and had a sow farm break with porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) a year ago when it was running rampant, it means they didn’t sell a lot of pigs in the summer of 2025. And now they have an even bigger hole to dig out of.”
It’s tough enough to survive the valleys in the market but even tougher when you don’t see the peak because of disease, he says.
“We’ve seen some really good family operations, some long-term players in this industry, make significant changes or even exit the industry due to disease,” Hays says. “It’s heartbreaking for all of us to see.”
In March 2025, the National Pork Board (NPB) received an advisement at National Pork Industry Forum asking the industry to facilitate the creation of a producer-led national swine health strategy.
After a robust data collection process last summer with more than 800 individual survey responses, 47 listening sessions with about 1,000 people attending a session, and many individual conversations, the results were boiled down and shared with a producer advisory group. This group, consisting of 12 producer leaders representing different geographies, sizes of operations and segments of the industry, developed a framework to help this effort move forward.
Meredith Petersen, NPB director of swine health, says the advisory group identified two overarching goals: significantly reduce the impact of endemic disease and keep non-endemic disease out. These goals were then shared with the NPB board of directors and National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) for their initial review, and has since been shared more broadly with the state pork associations for feedback with the goal of approval of the National Swine Health Strategy in March 2026. You can find it here.
What Does Success Look Like?
The industry has set some “lofty long-term goals,” Hays says. In his mind, success will look like moving the conversation from on-farm biosecurity to industry-wide biocontainment.
“I’m not diminishing the importance of on-farm biosecurity, or our ability to continue to improve that,” he says. “But until we shift that conversation to industry-wide biocontainment, I don’t think we’re going to get real improvement in U.S. herd health. We need everybody to focus on it and do their part. We have to stop moving this stuff around and stop doing this to ourselves.”
Petersen is optimistic that aligning work being done at the National Pork Board with some of these goals will give producers tangible, actionable information to use at the slat level.
“We have focused a lot on foreign animal diseases (FADs) for the last several years, and that was important and will continue to be important,” she says. “But I think it’s definitely time for us to be focused as well on domestic diseases.”
What Steps Will the Industry Take Now?
“How do we get there? That’s the million-dollar question,” Petersen says. “As the swine health team often says, ‘We have a clear destination with an unclear path.’ I thought that was a good way to phrase it. I think it depends on the priority in terms of where we start.”
For example, there’s been more industry work on disease elimination recently. She says this gives the industry the opportunity to start facilitating conversations across the industry and asking questions about cost and ROI of elimination programs.
“What kinds of things do we not have today that we need to have to achieve elimination? I would love it if we had a perfectly outlined plan,” Petersen says. “But I think importantly, we have the direction to now facilitate those discussions across the industry and give producers the opportunity to develop that plan.”
Producers are motivated to have these conversations now. Hays says the U.S. Swine Health Improvement Plan (U.S. SHIP) is a valuable tool in the toolbox to help producers move forward.
“To make change, you have to be motivated in some way,” Hays adds. “Unfortunately, in this situation, pain is providing the motivation. In the last few years, we’ve seen PRRS reach people in the industry that thought they were immune due to isolation, but that’s not the case anymore.”
An Entire Industry Approach for the First Time Ever
This isn’t the first time these issues have been discussed, but Hays says the difference now is that the industry is ready to get together in an organized way to tackle these problems.
“Producers are ready to do this. They’ve been talking about doing it, and we now have the leadership in place to help carry it out,” Hays says. “We’ve been dealing with PRRSV for 30 years, and PRRSV is winning. We’re losing. We’ve tried a lot of things, but we haven’t tried an entire industry approach where we’re taking all the tools in the toolbox and applying them all at once.”
Collaboration is critical to this working, Petersen agrees.
“We wanted these goals to be representative of you the top challenges producers are facing and incorporate their ideas for solutions,” she says.
Research was mentioned frequently in the surveys and listening sessions.
“We anticipate research being a component to help us achieve these goals,” Petersen says. “We want to make sure it’s coordinated, that we’re using the dollars we have and the dollars other funding organizations have to work towards these priorities, while maintaining as much collaboration and communication across groups as possible so we can go further faster for producers.”
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