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NIFA awards Swine Health Information Center with AFS research grant

The Swine Health Information Center (SHIC) recently received a federal grant to further its African swine fever research.

Associate director Megan Niederwerder says USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has awarded SHIC $650,000 to study the risk of ASF in soybean products imported into the U.S.

“Looking at environmental stability at various temperatures, and also validating and developing new diagnostic tools so that we are able to perform surveillance on some of these feed ingredients to evaluate contamination.”

She tells Brownfield the four-year project will help pork producers address foreign animal disease threats.

“If we can identify what soybean product stabilizes the virus to the greatest extent, we know to focus our mitigation efforts on that specific soybean product ingredient so that we provide those efforts with the greatest return on investment.”

Niederwerder says soybean products are widely used in complete pig feeds and are a potential risk when imported from countries where African swine fever is endemic.