At the World Pork Expo, Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Intern Maci Carter had the chance to visit with the President of the National Pork Producers Council, Scott Hays. Hays talks to Carter about the 2023 Farm Bill, biosecurity, Proposition 12, WOTUS, and more.
“The Farm Bill is well underway, and I had the opportunity to go out a couple of weeks ago and testify on the Farm Bill and got to explain to Congress what is going on in the industry and talk about the need for prevention and preparedness when it comes to foreign animal disease,” Hays said. “We got a vaccine bank approved in the last Farm Bill five years ago, and we asked for continued funding of that.”
Hays said NPPC also talked to Congress about exports and a few funding mechanisms that deal with exports.
“We need that,” Hays said. “We have several free trade agreements in place that are very important to the pork industry, but there is maintenance to be done on those. We need to make sure that our partners are living up to the agreement.”
There are some countries that receive U.S. pork that do not have free-trade agreements in place, Hays said, so work needs to be done in those countries to lower tariffs and implement a more level playing field for U.S. products.
As farms are always working on biosecurity, Hays said NPPC is engaging in conversations with the industry about biosecurity as an industry as a whole.
“We could be our own worst enemy with moving virus around,” Hays said. “The industry is always working on that. I don’t have any hard numbers on me, but just from visiting with producers and being around the industry, it seems like we had a better winter this year than we did last year.”
California’s Proposition 12 continues to be a big challenge for pork producers, Hays said, as the industry did not receive the verdict they hoped for.
“What we are doing in the short term, is we are working with California to try to make the startup go as smooth as we can because it is important that we continue to move product in there for producers,” Hays said. “We don’t need a backlog of products.”
The new WOTUS ruling also has an important impact on pork producers, Hays said, because they need the right to manage their farms.
“We don’t need a ‘one size fits all’ ruling or certainly a huge overreach for activists out of D.C. to tell us how to manage our farms,” Hays said. “When it comes to a pig farm, we have a tremendous asset and that is the manure from the pigs. We need to be able to apply that on the farms the way we know how it needs to be done.”
