Farmscape for March 31, 2026

The Swine Health Information Center has renewed its support for the University of Minnesota’s Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project.
After reviewing the 2025 accomplishments of the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project and its proposed 2026 objectives, the Swine Health Information Center Board of Directors has renewed its funding for 2026.
SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says it's a voluntary long-term project representing at least 30 different production systems designed to monitor swine health related to several major pathogens.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
It really is important to be able to monitor any of these disease trends and that’s for several reasons.
First, we want to be able to identify what diseases are happening and when and are they consistent in their presentation?
Because secondly, if we aren't monitoring then we would not know if a disease presentation changes.
So, we've got to be able to identify when a disease changes in activity or in severity to be able to dig deeper and find out what's happening and then be able to respond accordingly.
The goal really is to reduce that negative impact to producers and be able to protect their pigs from future problems.
Really, the main priorities are the voluntary submission of herd health status for different production systems.
This includes PRRS and PED, Porcine deltacoronavirus and Seneca A virus.
It also tracks the disease trends and monitors for different emerging pathogen activity.
It is also important because it extends through different research projects doing further investigation into some of these changing trends which augments the results and responses that can be submitted to producers to help them understand how to better protect their herd health.

Dr. Becton says the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project is an essential component of SHIC's mission, to monitor and mitigate emerging disease pathogens.
She says being able to monitor these different swine health challenges and the trends that occur in production over time is very powerful and beneficial for producers.
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Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers