Winton dairy farmer Rosemary Hamilton is preparing her farm to be hit by the disease Mycoplasma bovis as she believes it is unlikely the outbreak will be contained.
Hamilton and her husband Roger are heading into their tenth season as dairy farmers at their 348-hectare property near Winton and they are actively preparing for the disease.
At the time when news of the original outbreak broke, the couple had a veterinarian from the United Kingdom staying at the farm with them.
The vet told them unless the Ministry for Primary Industries were able to find and cull all the infected stock immediately, it was likely the virus would be tough work to eradicate, Hamilton said.
“Her instant comment was ‘you’ll never stop it’.”
The vet told Hamilton she did not think the country would be able to stop the disease because it was so hard to detect.
Hamilton’s main concern was that the cows on her farm could end up in an abortion storm in the third trimester of their pregnancy.
Because herds in New Zealand were naive to the disease, that was the one thing Hamilton and her husband were anticipating, she said.
The couple planned to keep some extra cows to mitigate any losses if they were hit.
While farmers had talked quite extensively about cows getting mastitis or calves getting pneumonia, there was little mention of the possibilities of abortion, Hamilton said.
“I’m not sure how many farmers are aware this is a possibility.”
All farmers were probably going to end up with bigger stock losses, she said.
Looking the European countries who had the disease, farmers had learned to manage the disease and it was not a problem for them.
She likened Mycoplasma bovis to the sheep disease, salmonella brandenburg, which emerged about 20 years ago.
Hamilton, who had been sheep farmer before she went into dairy farming, said when the sheep disease first hit the country stock losses were high with no way to cure it.
The disease was still present but now farmers had learned how to manage the risks and as a result, stock loses were not as high.
“I think further down the track Mycoplasma will be seen to be the same.”
Hamilton had no reason to believe the cattle disease was on her farm.
For her, the biggest risk was that her farm was not totally self-contained.
Now the couple would have to look at whether they would be prepared to take cattle from other farms on to their wintering block.
“From here on, it’s up to each farmer to assess their own risk and put risk management practices in place.”
Everybody would have to work together to make all the strategies work, Hamilton said.
Hamilton, who was an artificial Insemination technician as well as a farmer, put a number of processes in place to safeguard the farms she visited as part of her work.
Farmers initially question the practice but when the outbreak was discovered at the three farms near Winton, farmers were grateful, Hamilton said.
In her opinion, the people with the biggest problem right now were the bull farmers who were raising, rearing or buying bulls for dairy farmers to use.
All their bulls would be out being used as service bulls and now they would have to evaluate whether they wanted those bulls who were at different farms to come back to their property, Hamilton said.
Their risk was likely to be much higher than any dairy farm at the moment.
The disease was having an adverse effect on the farming community as those people like herself that would normally sell bull calves at weaning time could not find interested buyers,
No one would buy calves from Winton, she said.
In Hamilton’s case, it was not a problem because the second farm they had could take those calves but not everybody was in the same situation, she said.
Source: The Southland Times