Last November, the National Pork Board launched AgView, a technology solution to help the US pork industry respond faster than ever before possible in the event of a foreign animal disease (FAD) outbreak. The web-based tool will allow participating producers to easily share their farm’s FAD status updates and pig movement data with state animal health officials. The opt-in, no-fee technology – funded by the Pork Checkoff – will allow for contact-tracing of infected animals to help rapidly contain or regionalize a potential FAD outbreak.

AgView is designed to help the US pork industry coordinate a unified response to FADs across the nation – from grain farmers to producers, to state health officials, and veterinarians. When producer-users grant permission, AgView securely provides state animal health officials with health status and site and pig movement data from registered farms in real-time. This data sharing would go a long way in aiding an effective FAD response and could ultimately help the industry more quickly contain or regionalize an outbreak.

“While local and state reporting protocols already are in place, there is no nationwide repository for this data and no mechanism for real-time sharing,” said National Pork Board Chief Veterinarian Dr Dave Pyburn. “Time is money in an FAD response, which is why we’re excited to have AgView to help fill that gap and facilitate a quicker return to business for producers, especially in our export markets.”

AgView, as a single software platform, allows for the rapid and accurate visualization of relevant pig movement data and diagnostic test results to create visibility, accountability, and trust during an outbreak of African swine fever or another FAD. To make this easier for producers, and ensure data is up to date, AgView can integrate with many existing record-keeping systems for easy synchronization. For those who do manual record-keeping, AgView also accepts imports from an Excel template. For more information, visit pork.org/agview. To register for an account, go to agview.com.

Surveillance Working Group makes progress, funds multiple African swine fever and classical swine fever projects

Producers on the National Pork Board’s Surveillance Working Group voted to fund 10 proposals in the summer and fall of 2020 totaling $615,450. The projects address several areas including evaluating diagnostics to detect African swine fever (ASF) virus antibodies, developing classical swine fever (CSF) diagnostic tests to differentiate vaccinated animals from infected animals, investigating novel sample types to be used for ASF detection, improving oral fluid test performance, and evaluating ASF detection in oral fluid samples collected post outbreak. This research is being performed in the field in Romania, Uganda, China, Vietnam, and Thailand as well as in a laboratory setting in Russia, Canada, and the United States. The goal of this research is to improve ASF and CSF diagnostics and surveillance strategies as well as investigate new potential diagnostic sample types. The National Pork Board will release the results of the studies upon their completion. For more information about the working group or these studies, contact Dr Pam Zaabel at pzaabel@pork.org or (515) 223-2764.