North American Pork Producers Encouraged to Start Considering Mosquito Control Strategies

May 16, 2022

The Swine Health Information Center is encouraging U.S. pork producers to start thinking of strategies now to reduce the potential exposure of their pigs to mosquitos. Since it was first detected in February, the number of cases on Australian hog farms of Japanese encephalitis, a virus transmitted by mosquitos, has reached 73.

Dr. Megan Niederwerder, the Associate Director of the Swine Health Information Center, says the infection has resulted in high production loses.

Clip-Dr. Megan Niederwerder-Swine Health Information Center:

One of the things that we have tried to start discussing for reducing the risk in the U.S. is thinking about mosquito control now on your swine farm. So thinking about standing water, think about where mosquitos could be breeding or could serve as a potential infection source to your pigs, thinking about could there be a reduction in the mosquito entry into the farm, can you create a barrier or at least an environment that is less conducive to mosquito exposure to the pig, thinking about that now.

We're all concerned about the risk of JEV being introduced into the country and so some of these changes you can make now would reduce the risk in the future for any mosquito borne disease but we're also hopeful that we can put risk mitigation strategies in place to reduce the risk of that virus being introduced into the country.

When the virus is introduced into new areas that it has historically not been detected, we have to think about that the potential environment in the U.S. could also be conducive for those mosquitos and the virus to be transmitted in a country where we've never seen the virus.

Source : Farmscape

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.