Traceability is an important topic in the livestock industry. Dr. Patrick Webb, assistant chief veterinarian for the National Pork Board, says real-time traceability is vital to keeping the pork industry safe from a disease outbreak.

“For the herd veterinarian, having good traceability to understand how the animals are moving through the production system and the opportunities for disease potentially spread, that’s important for them. On an international level, on a national level, being able to rapidly determine where a disease is and isn’t, that speed and accuracy in which that can be accomplished, is directly related to how quickly USDA could regionalize the United States, so we know where we can start trade back up and start commerce back up with little risk of disease spread.”

Veterinarians play an important role when pigs move across state lines.

“There’s two areas that vets are critical. One is the use of the Certificate of Veterinary Inspection, right? So, all pigs moving for production purposes across state lines have to have a Certificate of Veterinary Inspection or be on what’s called a Swine Production Health Plan, which is a commuter agreement. Vets have a vested interest in the traceability of these pigs because that helps them with their own internal disease trace backs or a client’s disease trace back, but more importantly, that ability to determine where disease is and isn’t.”

Pork Checkoff-funded AgView is an important tool to improve traceability.

“AgView is a tool that could be used by the herd veterinarian or producer to set up Swine Production Health Plans. We have a feature in there that makes it pretty easy for those plans to be set up and approved and tracked, and basically having that ability to deliver, with the click of a button or even prior to an outbreak, sharing location and movements of traceability data with our state animal health officials prior to an outbreak at the producers permission or during an outbreak. So, we’ve got a tool out there, it’s no additional cost to producers and veterinarians, that can be used to support this pre-harvest traceability.”

Visit porkcheckoff.org to learn more about AgView, where users can sign up for a free account.