A national commission working on shoring up the country’s preparedness for biological threats, intentional or naturally occurring, was in Fort Collins on Tuesday to hear what should be done to protect agriculture and how farmers, ranchers and others on the front lines can help.
The privately funded met at Colorado State University. Members of the commission, which started in 2014, include former U.S. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Tom Daschle and Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and Department of Homeland Security secretary.
Congress and federal agencies have incorporated several of the commission’s recommendations to prevent problems and detect and respond to disease outbreaks, cyberattacks, terrorist attacks and other catastrophes. The meeting at CSU was focused on potential threats to agriculture and the consequences of a widespread disease outbreak among livestock or crops.
“This is a field that covers threats to essentially human health, animal health, environmental health” and the economy, said Alan Rudolph, CSU vice president for research. “It’s a recognition of the increasing frequency of outbreaks associated with pathogens or infectious diseases. It sort of mirrors the story line of how our antibiotics have become less effective.”
During the past few years, the U.S. poultry and pig industries have experienced serious disease outbreaks,Rudolph said. Climate change and its effects on the movement of animals and the spread of disease is also part of the bigger picture.
“And now China is experiencing the largest outbreak of pork disease, called African swine fever, in which itap estimated that 30 to 50 percent of China’s pig population will be lost,” Rudolph added.
The has said that about a quarter of the world’s pigs could die as a result, leading to food shortages and shortfalls in products made from pigs, including medicines.
Besides food and health risks, widespread threats to agriculture can wreak economic havoc, Rudolph said.
Daschle pointed to an avian flu outbreak that swept through a big swath of the U.S. poultry industry in 2015. He said the government at all levels should be commended for acting as swiftly as they did.
“But that disease ultimately resulted in the loss of 50 million birds across 21 states. By the time the disease ceased to spread, it had cost $3.3 billion in economic damage,” Daschle said. “Such devastation is avoidable.”
by the commission made recommendations for avoiding and dealing with such outbreaks, Daschle said. A recommendation to establish a national animal disease preparedness and response program was included in the most recent federal farm bill, he added.
In Colorado, agriculture contributes about $40 billion annually to the state’s economy, making it the second-largest economic sector. The Colorado Department of Agriculture said the state has more than 38,000 farms, encompassing nearly 32 million acres and supporting more than 170,000 jobs.
The impacts of a serious disease outbreak or other incident in the cattle industry would result in incalculable destruction, said Lee Leachman of Leachman Cattle Co. of Colorado in Fort Collins. He said the key is finding a balance between the freedom the industry now has to conduct business and regulations that would help better manage the movement and tracking of animals.
The biodefense commission is meeting in Fort Collins in part because of CSU’s work and research on infectious diseases and animal and plant health, said Asha George, the organization’s executive director. Members also want to focus on states and local communities involved with agriculture.
“They’ll be among the first that will have to respond if we have some sort of agriculture incident,” George said. “And their economies are going to be the ones hit the worst with any sort of outbreak.”
Rudolph said CSU has a long history of working on infectious diseases. The campus is also home to a U.S Department of Agriculture Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service facility and the federal Centers for Disease Control’s second-largest research laboratory, he said.
The Fort Collins campus is “the Fort Knox” of data on crop and livestock genetics, Rudolph said. The National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation and the National Animal Germplasm Program, both USDA programs, are on the CSU campus. The programs are a collection of the “foundation genetics of our crops and livestock in the country,” Rudolph said.
There are increasing concerns about cyberattacks on those kinds of facilities, he added.
Also on the campus is BioMARC, a nonprofit contract manufacturing service owned and operated by CSU. The facility produces products, including vaccines and diagnostic tests, for clinical and commercial use.
Rudolph said he will tell the commission about a coalition that CSU and five other land-grant universities in the West have formed to pool information and efforts to prevent epidemics and other threats to livestock and crops. Land-grant schools were started with revenue from land the federal government gave states and had a mission to teach agriculture and the mechanical arts.
The Colorado State University Extension has a person in every county in the state to work with farmers and ranchers in a variety of areas, including new technology and management practices, Rudolph said. The coalition sees outreach on biodefense as another program the extension service can offer.
