If there is one thing that keeps beef farmer Amy Hess up at night, it was a conversation she had with her farm’s former vet about foot-and-mouth disease.

“He was really concerned about foot-and-mouth disease, stating that it wasn’t if but when it would show up,” she says. “So, he always made us pretty aware of different diseases like that.”

Her Bow Creek Farm, just north of Hershey, Pa., is surrounded by homes and people who want to hunt. The chance of a disease affecting her 55-head beef herd is something she takes seriously, and it is one of the reasons she wants to develop a biosecurity plan.

“Just keeping our animals safe and trying to learn how to keep disease free from my animals and from them spreading it,” Hess says.

Hess was one of a dozen producers to attend the first of several planned beef biosecurity workshops in Pennsylvania. Dr. Julia Herman, beef cattle veterinarian with National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), walked producers through the 15-page “Daily Biosecurity Plan for Disease Prevention” booklet.

It was developed by the Beef Checkoff and Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) as the first step in getting beef producers to implement a Secure Beef Supply plan, a major component of the industry’s planned response to a FMD outbreak.

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While there hasn’t been a FMD outbreak in the U.S. since 1929, the recent highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak in dairy has put a bigger spotlight on biosecurity because development of biosecurity plans, whether beef or dairy, would allow a producer with no evidence of infection to get a permit to move animals to processing or other premises, and maintain continuity of business.

But it’s all voluntary. And given how beef and dairy farms are set up in comparison to commercial chicken and hog farms, it’s also a tall order.

FIRST PLAN: Amy Hess (left) gets help from Taylor Zahn, a Penn State beef Extension educator, on writing her first biosecurity plan for her farm, Bow Creek Farm, at a biosecurity workshop in Lancaster, Pa. “Just keeping our animals safe and trying to learn how to keep disease free from my animals and from them spreading it,” Hess says.

Herman answers questions about the challenges of biosecurity and lessons learned from the current HPAI outbreak:

What are the biggest challenges in getting farmers to take biosecurity seriously?

I feel like it’s complacency a lot. So, producers are already doing some things on a daily basis to protect their herd. But protocol drift is real, things that we know happen.

Cleaning your boots every time you go onto a new farm, that gets tedious. So maybe we stop doing that. Maybe we stop wearing gloves when we’re handling cattle, things like that. I think the fact that the cattle industry hasn’t had a devastating disease like the poultry and the swine industries … is also a challenge.

FMD, foot-and-mouth disease, hasn’t been in the country since 1929. Mad cow, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the last true case was 2003. Once that happened … a number of food safety things got implemented at our packing plants, and so all downed animals that show up at our packing plant get euthanized automatically and get tested for BSE to make sure it doesn’t get in the public food supply.

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So, we have a lot of protective stopgaps for BSE, but something like foot-and-mouth disease hasn’t happened in a long time. Producers are like, “Well, it hasn’t happened in so long, why do we have to prepare for it now?” But that’s what BQA tries to do with our biosecurity plans, is we try to look at it from a daily basis. And so all these things we do on a daily basis, like having animal health records, logging your visitors, all of those things can keep your animals healthy on a daily basis, but also apply when you have a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.

What can be learned from the current HPAI outbreak in dairy cattle?

I think high path avian influenza in the dairy cattle industry right now is a big learning opportunity for us on how daily biosecurity steps were not followed, and that’s why it spread so quickly. Because a lot of it is on our humans, it’s on our animals, it’s on our transport vehicles.

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How do we stop that transmission from happening? And I think we in the cattle industry can be a lot better in preventing that from happening.

NCBA is paying attention to it, and we’re trying to support the dairy industry as much as possible because we partner with them on a number of things, and we also know that dairy cattle will eventually become beef.

And so we try to support them as much as possible … but also thinking about how we can prepare our industry if something like this happens, and a lot of it comes down to that daily biosecurity and what practical things producers can implement.

When you meet with producers one on one on biosecurity, do you get any pushback?

When people hear biosecurity, I think they think that means locking their place down. And I really try to reinforce that it is little steps that all add up to that risk mitigation piece.

I don’t know if you saw the Swiss cheese example from COVID. Swiss cheese has holes in it. So, each slice of Swiss cheese is a mitigation factor in the cattle industry. So, one mitigation factor is quarantining your animals. Another mitigation factor is vaccinating your animals. One single mitigation factor itself doesn’t fully protect because there’s holes in it. But the more you can layer that on, the more protection you get.

BIOSECURITY KIT: Five more biosecurity workshops are being planned in Pennsylvania. The next one is Dec. 10 in Somerset County. At each meeting, farmers will be given a biosecurity kit with a variety of supplies.

Additional workshops upcoming

Five more daylong biosecurity workshops are being planned. The next is on Dec. 10 in Somerset County, Pa.

Registration is limited to 15 operations per session. Farmers will fill out biosecurity plans and ask questions of biosecurity experts.

Each operation will be given a biosecurity kit with a variety of supplies. Register at beefexcellence.com/events.

Download a biosecurity plan

For more on dairy biosecurity and to download a biosecurity plan, visit nmpf.org/resources/biosecurity.

For beef biosecurity resources, visit bqa.org/resources/biosecurity-resources.