Introduction
As African swine fever virus (ASFV) continues to spread across Europe and Asia (Dixon, Sun & Roberts, 2019), the United States Department of Agriculture has worked hard to identify potential risks for viral entry to the country and develop national response plans (USDA, 2020). While the primary focus has been on the risk of illegal entry of pork products, along with travelers from ASFV-positive countries (Taylor et al. 2019, Ito S, Jurado C, Sanchez-Vizcaino JM, & Isoda N, 2020), the possibility of ASFV entry via the importation of contaminated feed ingredients continues to gain recognition, based on a growing body of scientific evidence (Dee et al. 2018, Niederwerder et al. 2019, Stoian A et al. 2019, Dee et al. 2020). Recent publications have described the transmission of ASFV to naïve pigs following consumption of contaminated feed, along with the calculation of the minimum infectious oral dose in feed (Niederwerder et al. 2019). Survival of ASFV in several feed ingredients has been documented out to at least 30 days post-inoculation using shipping models simulating movement of feed ingredients from Eastern Europe to the US (Dee et al. 2018, Stoian et al. 2019). A consistent observation across all these studies was the ability of ASFV to survive in soy-based products, i.e., conventional (high protein/low fat) soybean meal, organic (low protein/high fat), soybean meal and soy oil cake, with reported half-lives of 9.6, 12.9, and 12.4 days, respectively (Dee et al. 2018, Stoian et al. 2019). This information justifies the need to understand the countries of origin of these specific ingredients, the respective volumes imported, and US ports of entry (POE) utilized. Access to these data would allow regulatory agencies to focus efforts and dedicate resources to a subset of critical ports, rather than the 329 US ports of entry (seaports, border crossings, and airports) currently overseen by Customs and Border Protection (United States Customs and Border Protection, 2020). Therefore, the purpose of this short communication was to conduct an analytical exercise to generate this information.