Webinar offers guidance on farm biosecurity
A recent webinar focused on ways for farmers to improve biosecurity measures on their operations, stressing the importance of combining measures rather than just doing one thing at a time.
“We need to think about the big picture of feed biosecurity and understand that all of these measures are additive in nature and all help reduce risk, and that’s the goal: doing things in combination that have the biggest impact on risk reduction,” said Jordan Gebhardt, a Kansas State University veterinarian.
Gebhardt and Paul Sundberg, executive director of the Swine Health Information Center, noted lessons from the African swine fever outbreak in Asia. They said testing showed that in feed trucks, most positive ASF tests came from inside truck cabs rather than outside surfaces. According to Gebhardt, this shows “they’re doing a really good job with exterior surfaces of feed trucks. They remove organic material, they dry and apply disinfectant to the exterior surfaces. However, the inside cabs are a lot more difficult to control.”
