USDA Announces $15.8M in Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Projects

A total of 60 projects, led by 38 states, land-grant universities and industry organizations have been awarded $15.8 million by the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to focus on the nation’s response and control to animal disease outbreaks, through the 2018 Farm Bill’s National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program (NADPRP).

“Consistent access to safe, healthy, and affordable food is a critical need for all consumers,” said Jenny Lester Moffitt, Under Secretary for USDA’s marketing and regulatory programs, in a recent release. “These Farm Bill-funded preparation activities are vital to helping us safeguard U.S. animal health, which in turn allows U.S. producers to continue to feed our country and the world.”

This year’s projects focus on enhancing prevention, preparedness, early detection and rapid response to diseases that threaten U.S. livestock, says the release, including helping states develop and practice plans to quickly control an outbreak, train responders and producers to perform critical animal disease outbreak response activities, educate and increase the use of effective and practical biosecurity measures on farms, and support animal movement decisions in the case of a disease outbreak. 

According to the release, some of the projects funded by NADPRP this year include:
• National Incident Command System Capacity Advancement at the Michigan Department of Agriculture and the Multi-State Partnership for Security in Agriculture;
• On-Demand Training for foreign animal disease diagnosticians for animal disease response at Texas A&M AgriLife Research;
• Targeted Learning Modules for the Poultry Industry on Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza at the University of Minnesota;
• Extending a between-farm African swine fever transmission model to estimate the necessary number of sample collectors in a highly swine dense region at North Carolina State University;
• Biosecurity Rapid Response Mobile Decontamination/Disinfection Gate for Animal Disease Outbreaks at the Maryland Department of Agriculture; and
• Emergency Response Preparedness for Foreign Animal Diseases and Mass Livestock Mortalities at North Dakota State University

A full list of the funded projects can be found on the NADPRP website.

The 2018 Farm Bill provided NADPRP funding is part of an overall strategy to help prevent animal pests and diseases, reduce the spread and impact of potential disease incursions, while protecting and expanding market opportunities for U.S. agricultural products. Over the last four years of NADPRP, USDA has provided more than $22 million in support of over 120 projects.