Iowa Beef Center director column
October 2022
Biosecurity on the farm and feedlot
We’ve learned a lot about biosecurity over the last couple of years. Isolation, social distancing and sanitation were words we heard almost every day. And some of us came to the realization that the beef industry doesn’t do this very well.
There are two levels of biosecurity for beef producers. One is for prevention of disease on the farm and the second is to prepare the industry at all levels from a foreign animal disease.
Good basic biosecurity on the farm or feedlot boils down to three things, all of them designed to reduce the exposure of cattle to disease: visitor management, isolation of new cattle and management of traffic flow in the feedlot. Visitor management includes items like visitor logs, insistence on clean footwear or providing plastic boots for disinfectant. If you are a cow-calf producer, do you isolate newly purchased seedstock before bringing them into the herd? For feedlots, can you isolate purchased groups of cattle before combining them into a single pen? Relative to traffic flow, do cattle trucks cross the feed area? If so, is there an alternative?
Other important biosecurity practices relate to manure management and disposal of dead animals. For questions on basic biosecurity for your farm or feedlot, your local veterinarian is highly trained in this area. Also, did you know that the national Beef Quality Assurance Program (BQA) has an online training module on biosecurity? While it does not substitute for basic BQA certification, the module is a good basic resource to learn more.
In-person BQA certification sessions will be starting up again in November. See an update of dates and locations. BQA is a national program administered by the Iowa Beef Industry Council (IBIC) in Iowa. The Iowa Beef Center partners with IBIC to conduct the trainings.
Enhanced biosecurity in preparation for a foreign animal disease outbreak such as foot and mouth disease brings biosecurity to a new level. The first step is simple - register your operation with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and get a premise ID. To learn more and register, go to the IDALS website. The Secure Beef Supply plan has lots of resources on foreign animal disease response, traceability and development of an enhanced biosecurity plan. Having this plan in place is a vital step towards continuity of your business in the face of an outbreak. For Iowa, the cattle industry has been watching closely the response to avian influenza and developing plans. The Iowa Department of Agriculture has been engaging all stakeholders including the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association and Iowa State University in simulated response exercises.
Since many of you are very busy with the activities of harvest in the month of October, we tend to avoid this month for local educational opportunities. In fact, October is the month where the faculty and staff of the Iowa Beef Center have professional development and take advantage of opportunities to learn new things that make us better at what we do. We also will be doing program planning for the fall and into 2023. Please let us know if you have thoughts or ideas. We will be planning listening sessions this fall or winter on program needs so let y your regional beef specialist know if you would like to participate. Finally, as I mentioned last month, please be intentional about safety this fall during harvest and the fall calf run.
The IBC at Iowa State University serves as the university’s extension program to cattle producers. Our center comprises a team of faculty and staff from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine and Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. We work together to develop and deliver the latest in research-based information to improve the profitability and vitality of Iowa’s beef industry. If you’d like to be notified of updates on progress of research projects or programs that might be coming to your area, please subscribe to our “Growing Beef” newsletter by following the link on our website, www.iowabeefcenter.org. If you have a question, use our “Ask our Experts” link. Also, feel free to call us at 515-294-BEEF or email us at beefcenter@iastate.edu. You can also follow @iowabeefcenter on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram and now AgFuse.
