- Industry: Government
- Number of terms: 41534
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The mutual recognition by two or more countries that each party's safety and sanitation standards for animal products, even where not identical, provide an equivalent level of protection to public and animal health. Aimed at facilitating trade, the practical effect of veterinary equivalency is that each country's individual products and facilities will not have to submit to the separate standards of importing countries and to cumbersome and costly inspections by foreign reviewers. Veterinary equivalency has been a contentious issue for the United States and European Union (EU); the two parties in 1997 agreed in principle to an agreement recognizing each other's standards, but it had not been finalized by early 1999 due to a series of unresolved technical disputes.
Industry:Agriculture
Vesicular stomatitis is a viral disease that can affect horses, swine, cattle, and other ruminants. It causes affected livestock to develop blisters in the mouth and on the dental pad, hooves, and teats. These blisters swell and break, leaving raw tissue that causes affected animals to become lame and to refuse food and water. The disease also is of concern because its symptoms are similar to those of foot-and-mouth disease, a devastating foreign disease of clovenhoofed animals that was eradicated from the United States in 1929. The only way to diagnose and differentiate these diseases is through laboratory tests. There was an occurrence of vesicular stomatitis in the southwestern United States in 1985, in 1995, and again in 1998. People who handle infected animals also can become infected. APHIS is working with state officials to identify all cases of the disease and prevent its spread.
Industry:Agriculture
Vaccines, antigens, antitoxins and other preparations made from living organisms (or genetically engineered) and intended for use in diagnosing, treating, or immunizing animals. Unlike some pharmaceutical products, such as antibiotics, most biologics leave no residues in animals. Veterinary biologics are regulated by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which licenses the facilities that produce them and conducts a program to ensure that animal vaccines and other veterinary biologics are safe, pure, potent, and effective.
Industry:Agriculture
The process of ensuring that each successive stage in the production, processing, and marketing of a product is appropriately managed and interrelated to the next, so that decisions about what to produce, and how much, are communicated as efficiently as possible from the consumer to the producer. Agricultural economists believe that vertical coordination of markets is particularly important in the food industry because of its complexity, the large number of firms that participate in one or more stages, and the relative perishability of the products involved. Vertical integration is a type of vertical coordination, but the latter does not necessarily require that a single organization own or control all of the stages. For example, the use of contracts and marketing agreements between buyers and sellers, and the availability of timely, accurate price and other market information are methods for achieving vertical coordination.
Industry:Agriculture
The integrating of successive stages of the production and marketing functions under the ownership or control of a single management organization. For example, much of the broiler industry is highly vertically integrated in that processing companies own or control the activities from production and hatching of eggs, through the growth and feeding of the chickens, to slaughter, processing, and wholesale marketing.
Industry:Agriculture
Perennial grasses, legumes, or shrubs with an expected lifespan of 5 years, or trees.
Industry:Agriculture
Nonpoint source pollution control practices that involve planting cover crops to reduce erosion and minimize loss of pollutants.
Industry:Agriculture
A charge levied on imports that raises their price to a level at least as high as the domestic price. Such levies are adjusted frequently (hence "variable") in response to changes in world market prices, and are imposed to defend administered prices set above world market prices. Under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, the variable levies of the EU have been converted into fixed tariffs or tariff-rate quotas.
Industry:Agriculture
Packers are increasingly using this method of determining how much to pay cattle and hog producers for animals. Rather than simply paying a fixed rate based on the weight of the animals, value-based pricing attempts to establish the individual merits of each animal (or lot) purchased, factoring quality characteristics such as yield, fat thickness, likely grade (such as choice, select, etc.) into a formula to arrive at the price that will be paid. Under this system, the producer assumes the financial responsibility that the animals, once slaughtered, will meet these criteria. In traditional pricing methods, it is the packer that bears the greater financial risks associated with the uncertain quality of the animals purchased.
Industry:Agriculture
In general, products that have increased in value because of processing; such products include wheat flour and soybean oil. Livestock are considered value added products because they have increased the value of pasture and feed grains going into them. The terms value-added and high-value are often used synonymously.
Industry:Agriculture
