Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome costs the United States swine industry more than $1 billion a year, Seth Mitchell, executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Council, told the 2026 Nebraska Pork Conference, where producers and allied industries discussed slowing the disease with the goal of eradicating it, Farm Progress reports.

"PRRS was identified in 1987, almost four decades ago, as a mystery swine disease," said Dusty Oedekoven, chief veterinarian of the National Pork Board. "PRRS continues to evolve and change, and the newer strains being identified are more pathogenic. They're harder to eliminate." Tools that once cleared the virus from farms no longer work as well, he said, and the 2018 African swine fever outbreak diverted research priorities that the board is now trying to rebalance.

Brock Pillen, co-chief executive of Pillen Family Farms, argued that nothing changes without an eradication goal: "We all spend all our days fighting biosecurity and fighting PRRS. If we want to make a change, we have to do something different." He said Nebraska, which imports few pigs, is a natural place to start a clean-farms initiative.

Oedekoven's first step is porcine epidemic diarrhoea, which arrived in 2013 but mutates more slowly than PRRS and has clearer signs; he believes eliminating PED within ten years is reasonable and cited Manitoba's eradication programme as a model. On costs, he urged producers to compare biosecurity spending not with zero but with the ongoing cost of lost pigs, lost production, veterinary bills and labour. Pam Dinslage, field veterinarian for the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, said the state's animal health staff can only help if they know: "Nobody's on the sidelines in this effort."

The conference also heard from Daro, a Nebraska company founded by Kristen Bernhard, formerly of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which builds early-warning systems for pig herds. Its environmental sampling tests water lines, hallways, truck cabs, trailers and feed rather than the animals, runs a proprietary assay and reports the same day. Bernhard said the method can give producers a four-day head start on an outbreak; in one case it located where infection began in a barn and the farm contained it in a single sweep.

Source: Farm Progress