Honey Bees Need Veterinarians Too

The Western Institute for Food Safety and Security is collaborating on a new course designed to educate veterinarians in treating diseases of honey bees through an award from the USDA Specialty Crop Multi-State Program.

School Part of Coalition to Enhance Food Safety

The Western Center for Food Safety—a joint effort between UC Davis’ School of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences—will join several other California organizations to launch a multi-year study to improve food safety through enhanced understanding of the ecology of human pathogens in the environment that may cause food-borne illness outbreaks, according to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration announcement today.

USDA Grant to Study Impacts of Livestock Grazing on Cover Crops

Livestock grazing could be beneficial for organic farming systems. To see if the practice poses any food safety risks, university, government and nonprofit partners - including the school's Alda Pires - will receive a nearly $1 million U.S. Department of Agriculture Specialty Crop Multistate Program grant to study the impacts of livestock grazing of cover crops on bacterial population dynamics, soil building and environmental health.

Livestock Have Pandemics Too

The Western Institute for Food Safety and Security (WIFSS) at UC Davis has been awarded a $560k grant from the USDA to develop a collaborative partnership between the university, federal agencies, state agencies, and animal agriculture industry to increase preparedness on dairy farms and poultry raising facilities.

A New App Helps Estimate Herd Prevalence of Bovine Respiratory Disease

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is one of the most significant illnesses impacting the health of pre-weaned calves. It’s the #2 killer of pre-weaned calves and of particular interest to dairy farmers in California, the nation’s #1 milk producer. Producers now have a new diagnostic tool in hand—a phone app that leads them through a scoring system for BRD—that aims to improve the health of pre-weaned calves on California dairies.

Applying Tech Innovation to Improve Animal Health

Keith Sollers has been announced as one of two new Innovator Fellows for Spring 2019 by the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health. He's working with Dr. Beatriz Martínez López to improve precision epidemiology for livestock through technology.

Honeybee Health Key to Agriculture

Bees are one of our planet's most important animals. They produce honey and they are the primary managed pollinators for a majority of high value specialty crops grown in the contiguous states of California and Oregon, such as nuts, stone fruits, vegetables, and berries. A problem looms for our animal friends, the bees. Colony losses are high due to a variety of environmental and biological causes including bacterial diseases.