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High Plains group plans for cattle catastrophes
MH: On the windswept highways of the Texas Panhandle, the sense of space is enormous. Flat, shortgrass plains, with horizon visible on all sides, all underneath a huge sky. With so much space, it's hard to imagine being in a crowd. Unless you're a cow. In fact, there are so many cattle in this part of the country, that the well-being of these animals is a matter of national importance. To understand why, you have to understand the process of cattle feeding. It's an industry. The bigger feedyards are like cities of cattle. I'm at Cactus Feeders, just outside of Cactus, Texas. This sprawling facility typically hosts 65 to 70 thousand animals. The monetary value of that many cattle is well into eight figures.
RO: You figure, say, maybe an average of a thousand dollars a head- so it's a large, large number.
MH: That's Ron O'Dell. He's the Director of Feedyard Services for Catcus.
RO: We have nine other feedyards. We have six more in the Texas Panhandle and three more in Southwest Kansas.
MH: The High Plains region begins on the steppes of Western Nebraska. It sweeps down through Colorado and Kansas, through the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and Northeast New Mexico. Because of the concentration of cattle feeders in this region, the High Plains produces about three quarters of the beef made in the United States.
RO: We get northern cattle, in from Montana, North and South Dakota, Colorado. We get cattle in from the Southeast -- we get a lot of cattle from that part of the world, South, Southeast especially.
MH: So what happens if these animals get sick with a contagious disease? What if they got foot and mouth disease? It's no threat to humans, but spreads rapidly among cloven-hoofed animals. This past winter, the South Korean government destroyed almost three and a half million animals, mostly swine, after a disastrous outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The estimated cost? Over two and a half billion U-S dollars. Could it happen here? That's where the Panhandle Agri-Security Working Group comes in.
BD: It was a response to the industry's need to influence USDA to conduct some basic research on how certain things would happen. Our biggest concern at that point in time would have been foot and mouth disease. It's still a very major concern- PAWG has gone a little bit broader and we look a little bit more at the multi-hazard type approach -- how would we respond to snowstorms or wildfires or other catastrophic events.
MH: That's Bob DeOtte, Coordinator of the Panhandle Agri-Security Working Group, or PAWG. DeOtte is a Professor of Engineering at West Texas A&M University. PAWG is a partnership of business people, researchers and public officials that began in 2005. It's an ad-hoc group that's mostly unfunded, although federal, state and local governments have contributed to specific exercises. The group is dedicated to the logistics of managing the region's livestock industries in the event of a crisis. Could be contagious disease, could be natural disaster -- the group has even addressed the possibility of industrial sabotage or bio-terrorism.
WK: We were talking a little bit about PAWG and "Agri-Security" -- after 9/11, that became even more serious. Identifying places around the United States that- if an attack should occur on them- would critically injure the area or the country.
MH: Walt Kelley is Chair of the Panhandle Regional Emergency Management Planning Committee. He says that many federal guidelines for managing diseased livestock are dated because they don't take into account the volume and scale of current production. The last foot-and-mouth outbreak in the US was in 1929- and some protocols hadn't been updated since then.
WK: Then when we started holding exercises and looking at the impact, we were able to finally convince the government that agriculture is critical infrastructure. This administration, over the last couple years, has placed a lot of emphasis on the word resilience, resiliency. That's where everything is headed now- How quick can we get back from something?
MH: The Panhandle Agri-Security Working Group has conducted exercises, simulating the most likely scenarios of disease or disaster. Although PAWG is a Texas group, simulations have involved participants from nearby Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado. The logistics of such scenarios are overwhelming. Consider a seemingly simple precautionary measure, for example, a stop-movement order. That's when, in response to a contagion or suspected contagion, the government orders all livestock to remain in the county where they happen to be at the time. Even if they're in a big metal truck with lots of other animals.
WK: Between Hereford and Amarillo, just at any given time, odds-on, we'll have between 25 and 40 trucks, on the roadway, in Randall County. At this point, I've got 16 hundred head of animals to do something with. Where am I gonna put them, how am I gonna feed them, how am I gonna get them watered. We can't leave them sitting on the trucks. It's a problem that must be dealt with. And it may be over in an hour or it may be taking five or ten days.
MH: The destruction and burial of diseased animals poses even worse ethical and logistical challenges. In South Korea's recent foot and mouth disease outbreak, the disorganized efforts to bury infected animals outraged the public. Some animals were reportedly buried alive, either by accident or negligence. And now, burial sites near water are being studied to see whether they menace Korea's drinking water supply. How would the Texas Panhandle respond differently? Within a hundred and fifty mile radius of Amarillo, there are over three million cattle. The members of the working group don't know where every single carcass could be buried, but they hope that some planning now could help the region handle a future catastrophe.
WK: The word "handle" is a scary word. Let's use the scenario of a tornado through a feedyard -- an F4, an F5. That feedyard has probably just been depopulated. Eight, nine ten years ago, we would have been scrambling to try to come together and know what's going on. Lessons that we've learned from our exercises may help us get through -- at least now we know how big a hole to dig. Now, how quick it may take us to dig that whole may be another question. I'm not gonna sit here and say we can "handle" anything that comes. I will say we're far better prepared now to deal with it and work together to get an event past us as quickly as we can.
MH: Up next for the working group: Making contingency plans for the region's dairies -- including guidelines for protecting the safety of the milk supply. Meanwhile, back at the feed yard, Ron O'Dell leads me in from the chilly wind and into the mill. It's a metal building with a sweet-and-sour smell from processed grain. He's showing me how the flaker uses corn right off the truck to make its own cornflakes for the cattle.
RO: ...and it has live steam going into the corn. Above that is a soak bin, that the corn's coming to, it's already been soaked in water, then it comes into the steam chest, goes into the peg feeder and into the rolls, and the corn runs between the two rolls and turns into cornflake. Cattle love that, they digest it well. They get a lot of the starch and stuff out of it. It's really good, really good cattle feed. And we'll show you some of the flake, the flake is, ah -- you can just eat it. If you had milk, you could just get you a bowl, have you a bowl of cereal.
MH: Outside, feed trucks criss-cross the facility's network of cattle pens and roads, delivering the ration to the waiting livestock. And just a mile or two away, in nearby Cactus, a huge JBS Swift meatpacking facility receives truckload after truckload of fed cattle -- and in turn dispatches truck after truck full of beef. The High Plains region depends on this industry. There was no housing bubble out here- this region has an old-fashioned, commodity-based economy. But cattle feeding, like all agriculture, can be just as fickle as finance. It's an industry as vulnerable as the lives of the animals themselves. This is Mark Haslett, Harvest Public Media.
© Copyright 2012, hppr
(2011-04-19)
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AMARILLO, TEXAS
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(audio transcript)
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MH: On the windswept highways of the Texas Panhandle, the sense of space is enormous. Flat, shortgrass plains, with horizon visible on all sides, all underneath a huge sky. With so much space, it's hard to imagine being in a crowd. Unless you're a cow. In fact, there are so many cattle in this part of the country, that the well-being of these animals is a matter of national importance. To understand why, you have to understand the process of cattle feeding. It's an industry. The bigger feedyards are like cities of cattle. I'm at Cactus Feeders, just outside of Cactus, Texas. This sprawling facility typically hosts 65 to 70 thousand animals. The monetary value of that many cattle is well into eight figures.
RO: You figure, say, maybe an average of a thousand dollars a head- so it's a large, large number.
MH: That's Ron O'Dell. He's the Director of Feedyard Services for Catcus.
RO: We have nine other feedyards. We have six more in the Texas Panhandle and three more in Southwest Kansas.
MH: The High Plains region begins on the steppes of Western Nebraska. It sweeps down through Colorado and Kansas, through the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and Northeast New Mexico. Because of the concentration of cattle feeders in this region, the High Plains produces about three quarters of the beef made in the United States.
RO: We get northern cattle, in from Montana, North and South Dakota, Colorado. We get cattle in from the Southeast -- we get a lot of cattle from that part of the world, South, Southeast especially.
MH: So what happens if these animals get sick with a contagious disease? What if they got foot and mouth disease? It's no threat to humans, but spreads rapidly among cloven-hoofed animals. This past winter, the South Korean government destroyed almost three and a half million animals, mostly swine, after a disastrous outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The estimated cost? Over two and a half billion U-S dollars. Could it happen here? That's where the Panhandle Agri-Security Working Group comes in.
BD: It was a response to the industry's need to influence USDA to conduct some basic research on how certain things would happen. Our biggest concern at that point in time would have been foot and mouth disease. It's still a very major concern- PAWG has gone a little bit broader and we look a little bit more at the multi-hazard type approach -- how would we respond to snowstorms or wildfires or other catastrophic events.
MH: That's Bob DeOtte, Coordinator of the Panhandle Agri-Security Working Group, or PAWG. DeOtte is a Professor of Engineering at West Texas A&M University. PAWG is a partnership of business people, researchers and public officials that began in 2005. It's an ad-hoc group that's mostly unfunded, although federal, state and local governments have contributed to specific exercises. The group is dedicated to the logistics of managing the region's livestock industries in the event of a crisis. Could be contagious disease, could be natural disaster -- the group has even addressed the possibility of industrial sabotage or bio-terrorism.
WK: We were talking a little bit about PAWG and "Agri-Security" -- after 9/11, that became even more serious. Identifying places around the United States that- if an attack should occur on them- would critically injure the area or the country.
MH: Walt Kelley is Chair of the Panhandle Regional Emergency Management Planning Committee. He says that many federal guidelines for managing diseased livestock are dated because they don't take into account the volume and scale of current production. The last foot-and-mouth outbreak in the US was in 1929- and some protocols hadn't been updated since then.
WK: Then when we started holding exercises and looking at the impact, we were able to finally convince the government that agriculture is critical infrastructure. This administration, over the last couple years, has placed a lot of emphasis on the word resilience, resiliency. That's where everything is headed now- How quick can we get back from something?
MH: The Panhandle Agri-Security Working Group has conducted exercises, simulating the most likely scenarios of disease or disaster. Although PAWG is a Texas group, simulations have involved participants from nearby Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado. The logistics of such scenarios are overwhelming. Consider a seemingly simple precautionary measure, for example, a stop-movement order. That's when, in response to a contagion or suspected contagion, the government orders all livestock to remain in the county where they happen to be at the time. Even if they're in a big metal truck with lots of other animals.
WK: Between Hereford and Amarillo, just at any given time, odds-on, we'll have between 25 and 40 trucks, on the roadway, in Randall County. At this point, I've got 16 hundred head of animals to do something with. Where am I gonna put them, how am I gonna feed them, how am I gonna get them watered. We can't leave them sitting on the trucks. It's a problem that must be dealt with. And it may be over in an hour or it may be taking five or ten days.
MH: The destruction and burial of diseased animals poses even worse ethical and logistical challenges. In South Korea's recent foot and mouth disease outbreak, the disorganized efforts to bury infected animals outraged the public. Some animals were reportedly buried alive, either by accident or negligence. And now, burial sites near water are being studied to see whether they menace Korea's drinking water supply. How would the Texas Panhandle respond differently? Within a hundred and fifty mile radius of Amarillo, there are over three million cattle. The members of the working group don't know where every single carcass could be buried, but they hope that some planning now could help the region handle a future catastrophe.
WK: The word "handle" is a scary word. Let's use the scenario of a tornado through a feedyard -- an F4, an F5. That feedyard has probably just been depopulated. Eight, nine ten years ago, we would have been scrambling to try to come together and know what's going on. Lessons that we've learned from our exercises may help us get through -- at least now we know how big a hole to dig. Now, how quick it may take us to dig that whole may be another question. I'm not gonna sit here and say we can "handle" anything that comes. I will say we're far better prepared now to deal with it and work together to get an event past us as quickly as we can.
MH: Up next for the working group: Making contingency plans for the region's dairies -- including guidelines for protecting the safety of the milk supply. Meanwhile, back at the feed yard, Ron O'Dell leads me in from the chilly wind and into the mill. It's a metal building with a sweet-and-sour smell from processed grain. He's showing me how the flaker uses corn right off the truck to make its own cornflakes for the cattle.
RO: ...and it has live steam going into the corn. Above that is a soak bin, that the corn's coming to, it's already been soaked in water, then it comes into the steam chest, goes into the peg feeder and into the rolls, and the corn runs between the two rolls and turns into cornflake. Cattle love that, they digest it well. They get a lot of the starch and stuff out of it. It's really good, really good cattle feed. And we'll show you some of the flake, the flake is, ah -- you can just eat it. If you had milk, you could just get you a bowl, have you a bowl of cereal.
MH: Outside, feed trucks criss-cross the facility's network of cattle pens and roads, delivering the ration to the waiting livestock. And just a mile or two away, in nearby Cactus, a huge JBS Swift meatpacking facility receives truckload after truckload of fed cattle -- and in turn dispatches truck after truck full of beef. The High Plains region depends on this industry. There was no housing bubble out here- this region has an old-fashioned, commodity-based economy. But cattle feeding, like all agriculture, can be just as fickle as finance. It's an industry as vulnerable as the lives of the animals themselves. This is Mark Haslett, Harvest Public Media.
© Copyright 2012, hppr
