Results of Prepare to Survive a Bio-disaster Workshop Series
The Prepare to Survive a Bio-disaster workshops were conducted to help dairy producers, allied industry, and local emergency managers understand the risks associated with a highly contagious exotic disease in livestock and how the industry from the farm level on up could be proactive in determining a strategy to prevent or reduce the consequences of such an event.
Julie Smith, DVM, PhD, of the University of Vermont, served as Project Director and Steve Van Wie, DVM, served as a collaborator. Selected counties in Vermont with significant numbers of dairy farming operations were chosen to host a series of three seminars between November 2008 and February 2009. Approximately 100 people attended, including dairy producers and cooperative managers, emergency responders, bankers, insurance agents, environmental planners and public health officers.
Workshop One used the foot-and-mouth disease event in England in 2001 to graphically describe to participants the draconian measures taken when an unprepared country was faced with an outbreak of a highly contagious foreign animal disease. Audiences were shown how such a disease could enter the United States and were briefed on the expected federal and state responses that would be activated to contain such a highly contagious livestock disease.
Results of Workshop One:
Approximately 85% of attendees reported far greater understanding of the impact that contagious animal disease would have on their livelihood and on their community. Fully 90% were unsure that community level response or protective plans currently exist for agricultural emergencies including bio-disasters.
Participants identified challenges such as a lack of awareness within the greater Vermont agricultural community of the impact of bio-disasters and lack of industry motivation to take appropriate steps. Participants recognized the need to increase understanding and partnerships with non-agricultural neighbors and elected officials
Workshop members were able to clearly delineate many elements of response including quarantine, euthanasia, disposal, communication, and the need for trained personnel.
At all venues participants expressed the need to create and maintain the ability to readily implement community-based protective measures and animal disease response plans that would augment state and federal level activities.
Workshop Two was scenario driven. Participants were asked to presume that foot-and-mouth disease had just been diagnosed within the United States, in California. Audiences were asked what they would want to know immediately, and what steps they would expect USDA and Vermont Agency of Agriculture officials to take upon hearing the news. This workshop included a discussion of federal payments available to producers who lose livestock to foreign animal disease and the financial ramifications to producers incurring those losses. The catastrophic credit presentation by Farm Credit was applicable to current industry conditions.
Results of Workshop Two
The need for timely accurate information became readily apparent as participants began to think through the impact on their own farms and on their localities.
- Producers would instantly demand detailed scientific and epidemiologic information about disease itself.
- Producers would want reliable time based predictions from authorities including the anticipated duration of quarantines or stop movement orders and estimates of disease end points.
Dr. Smith challenged attendees to self assess the risk of their own animals contacting and contracting the disease.
- Dairymen understood the interstate nature of their industry and articulated concerns about products or animals imported from an infected state.
- Producers listed factors that could inadvertently bring disease on to their own farms including movements of animals, vehicles and people.
- Producers would demand information on the steps being taken by regulatory agencies to protect Vermont livestock. Dairymen wanted access to a list of steps required to increase individual farm biosecurity. Instant, accurate, and useful guidance would need to be disseminated at the farm level.
Workshop Two closed with the statement, “You are now in the unknown zone.” Is the disease in Vermont? Will it enter Vermont? How do you keep your animals safe?
Workshop Three: Workshops One and Two caused dairymen to understand the ramifications of foreign animal disease. They realized that the widespread loss of animals to disease meant the loss of agribusinesses and by extension the loss of community.
Workshop Three was conducted as a facilitated town meeting with the intent of eliciting out-of-the-box thinking on the part of participants.
Results of Workshop Three
It became clear that while state and federal officials would be actively engaged in the discharge of their respective duties and missions, at the local, farm and community levels, especially where disease was not present, little assistance, few resources and sparse guidance could, today, be expected from the official response or control authorities.
Participants felt that waiting for a top-down initiative to protect and preserve a segment of the agricultural infrastructure would be foolhardy.
Producers began to understand the value of a bottom up approach to community preparedness. Everyone understood that the future of a farming community would hinge upon its own ability to continue agricultural operations in the face of an encroaching and potentially devastating disease.
The concept of a community level Agricultural Emergency Operations Center (AgEOC), planned now and perhaps eventually operated by a community in support of its agriculture, was laid out and accepted as a potentially workable survival strategy.
An “AgEOC” would be activated during a biodisaster to support essential movements of feed and other inputs onto—and milk off of—farms under the strict biosecurity protocols necessary to protect the community’s livestock from a devastating disease.
Going forward: The workshops enabled Dr. Smith and Dr. Van Wie to expand their outreach to the greater agricultural and emergency response community:
“Prepare to Survive” attendees included members of non-traditional agricultural associations, some of which are distrustful of government. Drs. Smith and Van Wie were invited to address those groups separately following the seminar series. These sessions enabled the collaborators to convey the message that when faced with a bio-disaster, Vermont farmers, both large and small, must function as a single, united agriculture.
After the workshops, Dr. Smith has continued to build relationships with entities ranging from Vermont Emergency Management to Local Emergency Planning Committees, state wide agricultural organizations and ad hoc planning groups to prepare for the day when a foreign animal disease threatens Vermont’s agricultural economy.
Prepare to Survive a Bio-disaster was sponsored in part by University of Vermont Extension with funding from the Northeast Center for Risk Management Education and the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service under award number 2007-49200-03888.
We are grateful for the support of the following local sponsors.
Yankee Farm Credit
McDermott’s, Inc.
Baker’s Ag Sales and Service
St. Albans Cooperative Store
Vergennes Large Animal Associates
Northwest Veterinary Associates
Cold Hollow Veterinary Service
Foster Brothers Farm, Inc.
Bourdeau Brothers
Alltech, Inc.