State animal health officials work tirelessly with industry and stakeholders to develop secure beef business continuity as well as F OOT-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak response plans for their…

This $182,665 Cooperative Agreement award, provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) under the Plant and Animal Disease, Pest Control, and Animal Care Federal Grant Program (CFDA 10.025), supports a project to assess the readiness of cattle feedlots in three states to prevent and respond to a potential Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak.

The project aims to validate the ability of participating feedlots to effectively implement FMD prevention and response measures recommended by their state animal health officials. Key activities include conducting tabletop exercises and field-based readiness assessments over a 30-day prevention and 60-day response period. The assessments will examine the feedlots' knowledge, capacity, and timeliness in performing the prevention and response activities. The project will provide valuable feedback to USDA and industry stakeholders to enhance FMD preparedness and business continuity planning efforts for the U.S. cattle industry.

State animal health officials work tirelessly with industry and stakeholders to develop secure beef business continuity as well as F OOT-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak response plans for their feedlot facilities, emphasizing both the value of pre-event planning and preparation as well as the extreme challenges feedlots face during an outbreak. Creating these facility-specific plans that will guide prevention and response activities is critical. Validating that the feedlots can perform the proposed activities and the challenges presented pre-event is just as important. Often, validation efforts are limited due to personnel bandwidth and funding. This project seeks to provide just such validation by assessing the ability of participating feedlots to effectively implement recommended prevention and response measures chosen by their state animal health officials based on an FMD scenario that first threatens the feedlots and then actually occurs. The readiness assessment will examine feedlots capability (KNOWLEDGE), capacity (personnel and equipment), and timeliness (acceptable timeframe of performance) to perform the chosen prevention and response measures with existing constraints and challenges feedlots face in their daily operations. Project activities include two real-world tabletop and scenario activities in three states that will experience scenarios of FMD-threatening feedlots to identify which prevention and response PLA nning activities should be implemented for future use. Following the tabletops, the readiness assessment process for each state's chosen prevention/response measures will be developed and conducted on each state's feedlots. The prevention readiness assessment will last 30 days, and the response readiness assessment will last 60 days. Following the assessments, an after-action activity with all participants will be conducted to discuss results, gaps, needs, recommendations, and next steps to provide to USDA and stakeholders. Project deliverables include tabletop reports, assessment reports, after-action reports, and a comprehensive final report outlining stakeholder recommendations and proposed next steps aiming to provide feedlot preparedness stakeholders valuable information to better their planning/preparedness efforts. Beneficiaries from the project are comprised of sahos, feedlot managers and staff, emergency programs and personnel, USDA, the U.S. Cattle industry and its stakeholders, national food security stakeholders, and current veterinary students with a desire for veterinary public health.