Ag research is vital to the future of American agriculture, including the pork industry. Dr. Lisa Becton, associate director of the Swine Health Information Center, says they have a lot of ongoing research projects.

“First and foremost, we’re working on our ‘Plan of Work for 2025.’ We released that call for proposals in early March and received 57 proposals. The really fun thing is that it encompasses all five of our strategic pillars, so it covers things such as transportation biosecurity. How do we assess information? Early disease alert systems, diagnostics, and monitoring, including the evaluation of wastewater and how that could be used for monitoring and surveillance of disease.”

She says the Center hopes to identify research projects that will get funding by the end of this summer. They’re currently finishing up work on biosecurity.

“We are just wrapping up our wean-to-harvest information, and we’re getting a lot of good results out of that, and that was focusing on biosecurity, in again, that wean-to-harvest space. We have a lot of reports that are coming up, and we’ll publish those in our newsletters and on the website, but recently focusing on transportation and that plant-to-transportation interface, so that’s going to yield some really good information. Lastly, we just finalized some of our H5N1 influenza research. I’m also really excited about that, because while pigs have influenza, we don’t have H5N1 in that population, but there are so many unknown things happening, and we saw what was happening in the dairy industry, and so we were trying to figure out how we better prepare in swine?”

The Center is also looking into possible vaccinations for H5N1 in pigs.

“We were funding some things that will help address vaccine development or at least evaluation of cross-protection. Do any of the current vaccines that we use give us any protection from H5N1? We don’t know, so we’re going to investigate that, looking at what H5N1 looks like in various ages of pigs. The big question is, does it transfer through the mammary glands like it does in dairy cattle? So, does that happen in pigs, sows to her piglets? We’re going to investigate that.”

It’s important to keep pushing out the message about the importance of biosecurity.

“It is important, and that’s our core mission because we want to provide research that’s applicable and practical and can be used every day. Because, you know, we still have to do some basic bench top science, but where the meat and potatoes were was how we impact it day-to-day on the farm. Whether it’s changing our shoes and footwear, a lot of times, some of the research people are thinking ‘Well, we already know that’ but it’s good to have observable data that can validate the practices that we do.”