MONEY

Pork producers preparing for possible deadly disease outbreak learned lessons from bird flu

Donnelle Eller
The Des Moines Register

Bird flu killed 31 million chickens and turkeys in Iowa two years ago and caused $1.2 billion in economic damage.

But a couple of other animal diseases — foot and mouth disease, and classical and African swine fever — could be even worse for Iowa and the nation, say pork producers, who outlined the industry's response efforts at the World Pork Expo Wednesday.

About 20,000 pork producers and exhibitors are meeting at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines through Friday.

In 2015, the bird flu virus led to the destruction of more than 31 million Iowa farm birds.

The industry is particularly concerned about the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, which hasn't been detected in the U.S. since 1929.

Officials say the United Kingdom, Korea and other countries are struggling to manage outbreaks, including killing large numbers of animals.

"Your mind could go crazy with the kinds of dollars that could be impacted with a full-blown, significant outbreak," said Bill Northey, Iowa's agriculture secretary.

"It could easily be many billion dollars," Northey said, especially if the disease spread from pigs to cattle and shut down U.S. exports.

Dead chickens are hauled to be buried in a farm field near Rose Acre Farms on May 12, 2015. Rose Acre Farms was depopulating its Winterset egg-laying operation after the avian influenza virus was discovered there.

Iowa alone exports $1 billion of pork annually, he said.

The impact likely would ripple into corn and soybean markets, weakening prices for the commodities used to feed animals. 

Iowa could be among the states hit hardest, since it's the nation's largest pork producer, marketing about 50 million pigs annually.

The state also is the seventh-largest U.S. cattle producer, with 3.9 million cattle.

U.S. pork producers are lobbying Congress to invest $150 million annually in the next Farm Bill to create vaccine stockpiles large enough to respond to a massive foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Pork leaders also hope to get producers to adopt the disease response plan, called Secure Pork Supply.

The National Pork Producers pointed to a study from Dermot Hayes, an Iowa State University ag economist, who estimates a foot-and-mouth outbreak would cost the beef and pork industries $128.23 billion over 10 years.

Additionally, corn farmers would lose $44 billion and soybean growers nearly $25 billion, pushing the total impact to nearly $200 billion, pork producers said.

Patrick Webb, director of swine health programs for the National Pork Board, said the group has worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, state leaders and producers to develop the response plan.

It's called a "cookbook" because provides step-by-step instructions to producers to prepare for an outbreak, respond and recover from it.

Webb said the plan may require more from producers — from stepped up biosecurity to documenting information about herd health and animal movement.

The U.S. livestock industry estimates about 1 million pigs and 400,000 cattle are moved daily.

Webb and Northey said the avian influenza outbreak that hit the nation in 2015 helped groups develop the pork response. They looked at the poultry industry's approach to issues such as humane euthanasia and disposal of animals.

"Unfortunately, their experience has led to a lot of lessons learned that we can adopt to our industry specific to foot-and-mouth disease," said Webb, a veterinarian.