Weekly livestock news: July 24, 2023

USDA awards $3.2 million to fund antimicrobial resistance dashboards

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is awarding more than $3.2 million in cooperative agreement funding to create antimicrobial resistance dashboards. These public-private partnerships will aim to improve access to information on antimicrobial resistance in domesticated animals, including livestock, poultry and companion animals. The 12 awards will help advance scientific knowledge around antimicrobial resistance through partnerships with the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture and a number of universities, according to the announcement. APHIS will use the dashboards to monitor trends in antimicrobial resistance patterns, detect emerging resistance profiles and better understand relationships between antimicrobial use, animal health management practices and antimicrobial resistance, Farm Journal’s Pork reports.

Baboon receives heart transplant from gene-edited pig, paving the way for human transplants

The first baboon received a heart transplant from a young gene-edited pig as part of a study expected to pave the way for similar transplants in human babies, according to the chief medical officer at the biotech company eGenesis. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig’s genome. These edits should allow the organs to be successfully transplanted into people, the team says. As soon as next year, eGenesis hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects, buying them time while they wait for a human heart. Before that happens, the team at eGenesis will practice on 12 infant baboons. Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days, but the company is optimistic, the MIT Technology Review reports.

September’s Herd That! Conference will feature presentation on seasonal ag immigration

The Nebraska Women in Agriculture program and the Nebraska Beef Quality Assurance program have announced the third annual Herd That! Conference scheduled for September 19-20 in Broken Bow, Nebraska. The two-day conference is expected to draw a variety of speakers and cover a range of topics. Addressing one of the more pressing issues facing agriculture producers, a webinar on seasonal labor and immigration will aim to help producers and ag industry professionals understand available options for navigating agriculture visa programs. It will include the state of ag labor and historical use, an overview of visa requirements, procedures, compliance and employer obligations. Speakers addressing this topic will include a research economist, an attorney and an assistant professor and livestock economist. Farm Progress has more.

Pork producers work to find best practices for performance data analysis

As hog operations have grown and become more specialized, managers are developing more comprehensive statistics with which to measure performance, Farm Progress reports. They are finding that comparing pigs per sow on one’s farm this year compared to last year can help identify a trend. However, comparing pigs per sow per year on one farm to that of another may or may not accurately compare both farms’ performance. A challenging part of using litters per sow per year is that not all record-keeping systems calculate the measure the same way. Furthermore, records can be creatively managed to inflate litters per sow per year. Factors such as housing and the size of the breeding herd can also impact the interpretation of data.

Lack of regulation in U.S. animal markets heightens pandemic risk, researchers find

A recent examination of 36 U.S. animal markets found that the U.S. live animal trade is largely unregulated, leaving people at risk the next time a pandemic erupts. As one expert notes, it’s especially important to take industrial animal agriculture seriously because of its scale. Pigs, which are raised in greater numbers in the United States compared to elsewhere, can act as carriers of influenza viruses. There are also significant gaps in regulation practices in industrial agriculture, Ann Linder, lead author of the recent report, told The Harvard Gazette. The USDA doesn’t regulate on-farm production activities, but if a disease spills over to a livestock worker or a consumer who eats the meat after slaughter, these communicable diseases can spread person-to-person and erupt into a large-scale outbreak, Linder said.

U.S. House rep discusses bills to protect agriculture from foreign animal diseases

Exports are essential to the agriculture community and rural economy, so it’s no surprise producers fear a foreign animal disease outbreak that could devastate flocks and herds, preventing farmers from selling their products on the global market. The Foreign Animal Disease Prevention, Surveillance and Rapid Response Act of 2023 would reauthorize three programs—the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program, and the National Animal Vaccine and Veterinary Countermeasures Bank—designed to support vaccine stockpiles, coordinate rapid response efforts and provide a framework for federal, state and university animal health labs to detect, prevent and monitor FAD outbreaks. In addition, the Safe American Food Exports Act would authorize the USDA to negotiate regionalization agreements with global trade partners in case of an animal disease outbreak. U.S. House Rep. Randy Feenstra writes about the bills in the Sioux City Journal.