Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays caught up with Gene Lowrey, General Manager of XIT Feeders and Chairman of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, to talk about the Secure Beef Supply (SBS) Plan.
XIT Feeders hosted a Secure Beef Plan Exercise on Thursday with approximately 100 stakeholders involved in walking through what might happen if a foreign animal disease like Foot and Mouth Disease was discovered somewhere in the United States. The exercise was designed to help the cattle industry know what a lockdown for such an outbreak might look like in real-time.
If there were a disease outbreak in the US, the SBS plan gives them written protocols to continue operations while preventing further spread of the disease.
“We’ll have a diagram of flow for employees, cattle, grain, and other feedstuff coming in and out,” Lowrey said. “Cattle have to move. That’s a huge part of our business and if we can keep things moving, we are going to be in a lot better shape.”
Getting feed into the feedlot in a safe manner is also a big concern as most of the cattle feeding facilities around the U.S. have limited storage for dry grains.
For a large facility like XIT Feeders, movement is critical. In a normal week, XIT Feeders ships 3,000 – 3,500 cattle out, and ideally the same number comes back in. The facility also averages 120 – 150 loads of grain into it. An outbreak of Foot Mouth Disease anywhere in the US would require all cattle movement to be suspended for a 72 hour period.
“In that situation, our goal would be to get them moving again as fast as we can,” Lowrey said. “We want to prove that we can keep the bad things out and prevent the spread of disease so we can keep commerce moving. We want people to understand how big a deal this is, and how much time and effort it will take to execute this, so the disease won’t spread. We also want to continue to move cattle out.”
The exercise kicked off with remarks from Lowrey as well as from TCFA President and CEO Ben Weinheimer.
“Discussions related to foreign animal disease outbreaks here in the U.S. trace back to the early 2000s when the UK had a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak,” said Weinheimer. “In 2001 the discussions started from scratch on the preparedness of the U.S. to respond to FMD, a disease that was stamped out in the U.S. in 1929 and one that we hope to not ever revisit. Nonetheless, as we observed what the UK experienced, we realized we needed to invest considerable time, resources and energy in planning and preparing for something like the reintroduction of FMD.”
“Initial exercises were hosted in 2003; a tabletop exercise was hosted in 2007 and again in 2016,” he continued. “The agencies involved at the tabletop exercises had established plans, but we kept coming back to the need for cattle feeders to step up our efforts in creating our own plans and procedures to implement. Since then, feedyards have worked with a number of agencies to create individualized plans for their feedyards, so that if and when they need to be implemented, we have the ability to switch from normal operations to heightened biosecurity. This exercise serves as another step in the right direction for the cattle feeding industry’s preparedness for a foreign animal disease outbreak.”
Attendees toured the feedyard, which allowed them to see the XIT Feeders plan in action, including lines of separation and the protocols required for vehicle, cattle and human entry and exit to the feedyard.
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