There is mounting concern about the negative animal health and supply chain consequences of animal disease outbreaks in the United States. Recent disease outbreaks have drawn attention to the need for additional understanding of biosecurity efforts to reduce disease frequency, spread, and impact. Biosecurity is a key component of the Secure Pork Supply (SPS) Plan designed to provide business continuity in the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak as well as help protect operations from endemic diseases. Core biosecurity recommendations outlined in the SPS Plan are a written site-specific biosecurity plan and implementation of a perimeter buffer area and a line of separation. To-date, no benchmarking of SPS Plan biosecurity implementation has been done. Utilizing data from a 2017 survey of U.S. swine producers, this study shows that SPS Plan biosecurity adoption varies and is affected by how feasible producers believe implementation of each biosecurity practice is on their operation. Furthermore, binomial logit regression analyses indicate producer and operation demographics and producer risk attitudes and perceptions affect biosecurity adoption. Conditional probabilities reveal that adoption of biosecurity practices is overwhelmingly complementary, suggesting that one biosecurity practice likely increases marginal efficacy of another biosecurity practice. The insights this study provides regarding the complexities of biosecurity adoption are vitally important to both educators and policy makers.

No abstract

The prospect of a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in U.S. livestock populations has motivated the development of the Secure Beef Supply (SBS) Plan, which includes a comprehensive list of enhanced biosecurity practices that aim to prevent FMD transmission and facilitate continuity of business during an outbreak. While FMD poses a serious threat to livestock production in the United States, little is known about producers' uptake of the enhanced biosecurity practices included in the SBS Plan. In this study, we benchmark adoption and feasibility-of-adoption perceptions for U.S. cattle producers. Our results show adoption of the 13 enhanced biosecurity practices is generally low. Especially concerning is the low adoption of the three strongly-recommended pre-outbreak practices—having a biosecurity manager, having a written operation-specific enhanced biosecurity plan, and having a line of separation. Adoption of the pre-outbreak practices is likely low because the benefits of adopting the practices depend on a low probability, uncertain event. That said, producers who have adopted the pre-outbreak practices are more likely to have higher feasibility ratings for the remaining enhanced biosecurity practices, suggesting that adoption of the strongly recommended practices is associated with adoption of all enhanced biosecurity during an FMD outbreak. Complementarity is examined and shows that adoption of the pre-outbreak practices coincides with adoption of the outbreak-specific practices. Taken together, our results suggest that adoption of the strongly recommended pre-outbreak practices could help facilitate a quicker and more effective U.S. cattle industry response to an FMD outbreak in the United States.

Most U.S. beef packers with multiple plants now openly employ multi‐plant coordination. Using a Salop Circular City framework that includes negotiated and formula pricing, we demonstrate that multi‐plant coordination leads to wider spreads between downstream beef prices and upstream fed cattle prices if multi‐plant coordination markdowns outweigh multi‐plant coordination efficiencies. Taken together with market concentration, geography and transportation costs, and cattle cycles and related beef packer capacity utilization, multi‐plant coordination helps explain persistently wide farm‐to‐wholesale beef price spreads. We find that, as cattle inventories decline, a multi‐plant coordinator will permanently shut down a plant before the same plant run as a separate profit center will shut down, which is consistent with packer behavior in recent years. We also demonstrate that adding a strategically‐located packing plant, owned by an entrant firm, can narrow price spreads. This framework is important for ongoing policy discussions regarding the structure, conduct, and performance of the beef packing industry.