Farmscape for April 22, 2026

The Director of Swine Health with the National Pork Board says the creation of a producer led National Swine Health Strategy will improve the lives of pigs and the producers whose livelihoods depend on those pigs.
Last fall, as part of a coordinated industry-wide effort to improve the health of the U.S. swine herd the National Pork Board and the National Pork Producers Council conducted listening sessions and an online survey to gather input from pork producers for the creation of a National Swine Health Strategy.
Dr. Meredith Peterson, the Director of Swine Health with the National Pork Board who is facilitating the effort, says it’s exciting to see producers putting such a focus on swine health.

Quote-Dr. Meredith Peterson-National Pork Board:
We collected a robust set of insights from producers.
We shared those insights with an advisory group of producer leaders who set the path for us in the form of two goals and five priorities.
These are goals and priorities that the entire industry can work towards together.
It's not just a Pork Board effort but there's opportunity for anyone who works in the pork industry to help support these goals and priorities.
Specifically, the two goals and the five priorities related to the National Swine Health Strategy are one, keep out foreign and emerging diseases and it has two priorities.
One is preparedness and prevention of foreign animal disease and the second is continued monitoring for and preparing a response for emerging diseases.
The second goal is related reducing the losses or impact of domestic diseases.
The specific priorities to work toward under that goal are some long-term priorities of PED and PRRS elimination as well as more generally just reducing the spread of disease from site to site in the U.S.
As you can recognise there's some lofty goals there but, at the end of the day, if we don't set our goalposts, we won't make the decisions as an industry or work together as an industry to get to that place at some point.

Dr. Peterson suggests this effort represents a new approach to addressing high consequence swine health challenges.
Details on the National Swine Health Strategy can be found at porkcheckoff.org/strategy.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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