An advisement at the 2025 National Pork Industry Forum to develop a National Swine Health Strategy has fueled an industry-wide effort to take a deeper look at swine health. But before the advisory group starts developing the strategy, they wanted to connect with producers and find out what their biggest swine health challenges are today and how they think the industry could address those challenges.
“Over the summer, we conducted 47 listening sessions with producer groups and allied stakeholder groups,” Dusty Oedekoven, National Pork Board chief veterinarian shared at the 2025 Allen D. Leman Swine Conference. “We collected over 822 surveys, about 68% of the total responses were from producers. The other responses were from veterinarians and allied stakeholders.”
He says a majority of the producer respondents were independent producers. One thing they heard in the listening sessions, especially among the show pig sector, was a lack of access to veterinary services and veterinarians willing to help them make health decisions within their population.
“It wasn’t all commercial or system responses,” Oedekoven says. “We had a good response from the show pig and niche sectors, too. This is for the entire industry, and it’s really going to be important that we get a strategic direction for us to be able to share those strategic priorities within all segments of the industry and get some buy in for actually making a decision to improve swine health.”
The data is being compiled now for the advisory group to dig into at their meeting in October, Oedekoven says. Then, the advisory group will set the strategic direction from which they will start to develop the work plans and output that can help achieve that strategic direction. After that, they will present these ideas to the boards in November and present an update at the Pork Industry Forum in 2026.
Although some of the strategies may be driven by National Pork Board, NPPC, state associations, researchers or allied industry, Oedekoven says it’s starting with and ending with producers.
“What we are trying to do is qualify that what we’re hearing is the producer voice, and that’s where we’re going,” he says.
Of course, veterinarians will be a really important group to engage with this strategy.
“Swine health relies heavily upon veterinary input and veterinary action. We need veterinarians to be a part of the solution,” Oedekoven says. “The other group is the research community. We need to direct our research investments in activities and research projects that align with these priorities.”
Oedekoven can’t help but be excited about what’s ahead. The success of the approach the industry took with African swine fever preparedness efforts is a great model for this strategy, he explains.
“We had those six priorities that drove our board and staff actions and activities related to ASF preparedness,” he says. “That’s still ongoing. We’re still working on those things. But I think it was recognized that we need to look at other issues affecting swine health through this lens, too.”
