Poultry farmers have been picking up the pieces as we start to move away from the latest avian influenza outbreak, while pork producers are looking ahead at what this means in their industry.

While Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza is different from African Swine Fever, and even Foot and Mouth Disease, there are similar concepts that producers can learn when it comes to their response.

Before 2015, the pork industry was the leader in biosecurity in animal agriculture. However, after the poultry industry was hit by the avian influenza outbreak in 2015, it quickly caught on and improved its biosecurity.

In order to look at what works, it is important to look at what happened in 2015, the year of the largest foreign animal outbreak in the U.S.

In 2015, 77 sites and 30 million birds in Iowa were impacted, this year only 19 sites and 13 million birds were affected said Iowa Ag Secretary Mike Naig at the World Pork Expo.

That meant that biosecurity was next level this year that producers had taken ownership in a way that they not only had plans, but they also trained to those plans and then they executed on biosecurity in a way that that was improved and so it contributed to not seeing that kind of spread.

Effective response time was also a lot quicker in 2022 than it was in 2015.

The combination of increased biosecurity and having an effective response plan would also carry over with African Swine Fever.

The whole concept here is that you're trying to find it, contain it, and knock down the virus load and the way you do that is you act quicker and you do it more effectively. And so that was a lesson learned in ’15. It was underscored we drove a very bold line under those concepts this year.

And what will be a major player in the response will be the diagnostics lab at Iowa State University.

Iowa Farm Land Sets New County Record

LOOK: The most extreme temperatures in the history of every state

Stacker consulted 2021 data from the NOAA's State Climate Extremes Committee (SCEC) to illustrate the hottest and coldest temperatures ever recorded in each state. Each slide also reveals the all-time highest 24-hour precipitation record and all-time highest 24-hour snowfall.

Keep reading to find out individual state records in alphabetical order.

 

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