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Pork industry running practice ASF drills

Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue says the agency is daily tracking African Swine Fever and encouraging vigilance in the U.S.

“From an alarm standpoint, we’re working with our states in developing a network of early detection and certainly the most important thing we have is our APHIS workers working at the borders to make sure these products don’t come into the U.S.”         

Mary Kelpinski with the Michigan Pork Producers Association says emergency training drills are taking place across the country to help farmers and state officials identify biosecurity risk areas.

“All of the animals would not be able to move.  They would have to stay right where they are on the farm and when they reach market weight, they wouldn’t be able to go to processing.  We also would have restricted movement on and off the farm so we wouldn’t be able to bring feed onto the farm, we wouldn’t be able to bring vehicles on, or employees.”      

She says the pork industry and regulators need to sort out a lot of logistics and space requirements that would be involved if there ever was to be an outbreak in the U.S.