Reprinted from the West Texas A&M University website
by Joe Wyatt
(Canyon)—Introduction of a foreign animal disease into livestock-rich West Texas would be devastating. It’s a fact of life that led more than a year ago to formation of the Panhandle Agro-security Working Group (PAWG), an association of experts focused on crisis response, particularly as it relates to agriculture.
“Just one vial of the wrong biological substance released in the Panhandle could cost us our future unless we prepare now,” Don Topliff, head of the Department of Agricultural Sciences at West Texas A&M University, said.
Topliff and others from the West Texas A&M faculty were in on the ground floor in November 2005, when PAWG was conceived. In fact, Bob DeOtte, WTAMU associate professor of environmental engineering, is chairman of PAWG, which is comprised of officials from the university, the agriculture industry and from city, county and state emergency-management, animal-health and law-enforcement agencies.
Even the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Department of State Health Services, among others, are on board.
“We’re all about developing protocols to improve our security and effect rapid response,” DeOtte said. “It’s very much about developing efficient communication and assembling resources.
“PAWG is completely voluntary, but everyone who came to the table over a year ago is committed to working together to devise strategies, not only to respond in a time of crisis, but to do what is necessary to reduce our vulnerability, to be proactive and make the idea of terrorism less attractive to terrorists.”
It has only been a year-plus since PAWG was formed, yet already the group has undertaken exercises to improve security, develop plans for rapid response and expand its resource base. The latter came in handy last year when wildfires torched the region.
“We had already been doing a lot of organizing when the wildfires hit last March,” DeOtte said. “It was suddenly a lot easier for people on the District Disaster Committee to call in needed resources because by then everyone already knew everyone through PAWG.”
The agriculture industry, though, is the main focus of PAWG, and participants realize that if a foreign animal disease should break out in the Texas Panhandle, it could have far-reaching impact because the agriculture industry is a key component of the nation’s infrastructure.
Concentrated animal feeding operations on the Texas High Plains produce more than 30 percent of fed beef in the nation. Furthermore, the region that includes the Texas Panhandle, eastern New Mexico, eastern Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and the Oklahoma Panhandle, is home to 80 percent of the nation’s fed cattle, and that accounts for gross annual sales in excess of $17.5 billion.
“When you consider swine and dairy products and all the livestock-support industries like grain suppliers and processing plants, the impact of a foreign animal disease here or nearby could be economically devastating,” DeOtte said. “A lot of people are employed by agriculture, whether directly or indirectly.”
DeOtte said PAWG is the brainchild of John Sweeten, resident director of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station at Bushland, and he describes the group as a “think tank” that already has helped improve regional agricultural security. It is because of security issues that DeOtte chooses to not divulge exactly how or why, but he did say: “It is my consistent observation that the Texas Panhandle is leading the nation on preparedness for the introduction of a foreign animal disease. We have much to do, but we understand the issues at least as well as anyone in the country and better than most.”
Guy Loneragan, assistant professor of animal science at West Texas A&M, is not giving away any secrets, either, but the epidemiologist is certain that brainstorming exercises already undertaken by PAWG have and will continue to pay dividends.
“Preparedness in terms of agro-security is a dynamic process,” Loneragan said. “As companies, the agriculture-urban landscape and security threats change, so must we adapt our preparedness.
“To that end, preparedness in the Texas Panhandle has taken tremendous strides in the last year because of PAWG and the leadership of DeOtte. We are observing progress in many areas including vulnerability evaluation, communication and coordination with all groups that would be involved in preventing and responding to an actual security breech, and exercises that hone everyone’s role during an attack.
“More work certainly is needed, but we’re on the right track,” he said. 