National Pork Producers Seek Disease Preparedness Funding in Farm Bill

National Pork Producers Council President-Elect Lori Stevermer says that like many other ag organizations, they too are giving input into the next farm bill with their priorities, one of which is making sure there's funding for animal disease response.

“One is the National Animal vaccine bank. So that's a bank of vaccine to help us prepare against Foot and Mouth Disease. That's something that we've asked funding for a number of years and really isn't just for us in the pork industry, but also across the cattle industry, also Ohe other thing we're wanting funding for us to continue funding for those national animal health lab networks are those NAM, those labs are really key for diagnostic work and testing and helping us to respond. So in case we do get a disease, we want to be able to have testing done diagnostics done so that we can identify that disease as soon as we can. Certainly, something like ASF is critical. So if that should get in here, we need our labs to help us identify it so we can track it, we can trace it and handle it appropriately.”

Stevermer says it's also important to be prepared for animal disease outbreaks.

And then we just want to be able to have supplies on hand for preparedness and prevention.

“I should say more preparedness if a disease comes so making sure our stock of whatever equipment those labs and so forth need is well supplied.”

National Pork Producers Council President-Elect Lori Stevermer.