THE BCVA PRESIDENT, ANDREW COBNER, had just completed a five-hour cycle ride with the Falmouth Wheelers when we sat down at 4pm to talk about various issues.
Andrew explained that he uses some 500 calories per hour on the bike and needed to refuel with fish pie, scones, jam, cream and coffee in the Pandora Inn at Restronguet Creek, Cornwall.
Before becoming president, he had not been on a bike since he was a teenager and soon he will be travelling from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 15 days, thus the training, donning of lycra and support from the Wheelers.
Learning to ride a bike to achieve up to 80 miles a day is one aspect; learning to ride as a pack without endangering yourself, or others, is a further skill.
The project for the BCVA, in its 50th year, is to raise £50,000 for the charity Send A Cow. The initial group sets off on 7th May. Past presidents are joining in, some for the whole trip, some for one leg and some offering other support.
One or two are said to be cleaning off the rust from their bikes, unused for years, in order to cover a few miles until wind and limb call enough. There seems to be considerable emphasis on coffee and cake as practices will be visited along the route for refreshment stops.
The organisation is well in hand, the route is planned and everyone is invited to participate. Veterinary practices are requested to arrange an event to contribute £500. Rugby shirts from the Six Nations are being sought and together with a Lions shirt, to be signed by the team in New Zealand, auctioned.
Individuals with personal contacts are working hard to make a success of the venture. It is rumoured that the CVO will be starting and may complete the trip if no national emergencies pull him off his bike. Separate activities are in hand for Wales and Ireland. Contact the BCVA if you have ideas and suggestions: office@cattlevet.co.uk.
Bicycle riding is a worthy distraction, but the issues of concern with cattle continue and Andrew highlighted some of the current activities. BVD is able to be eradicated from England and we discussed the real scale of the problem to target dairy and suckler herds.
For the UK there are nearly as many beef breeding animals as there are dairy. England hosts some 1.1 million dairy and 0.7 million beef cows, giving just under 2 million target animals for BVD eradication. Devon, Cumbria and Somerset have the greatest number of dairy holdings, with 7,100 in England, but detailed figures for suckler holdings are lacking.
Historically, there have been around twice the number of beef holdings to dairy. Whatever the total figure for dairy and suckler cow holdings, there are some 600 registrants for BVD England. There needs to be an acceleration of effort. The England programme does not have government funding and it is left to the industry to achieve eradication.
Locate and cull
If 10% of herds have Persistently Infected animals at a rate of 1% per herd, then starting with 2 million the task is to locate and cull 2,000 PIs. Technically, these beasts need to be identified and removed from the herd immediately, before they infect others.
At the spring sales, buyers can check the BVD status of a herd by mobile phone before bidding and the impact of this on prices will be carefully monitored.
Would a scheme to compensate farmers for slaughtering a PI be viable? Would it be better to encourage testing by subsidising the cost? Without a pot of gold in support, these initiatives are mere speculation but the national benefits from BVD eradication will be greater than the benefit of reducing overall disease in herds.
The strong hint is that the BCVA would welcome a constructive intervention from the government. Activity on the ground by veterinary practices needs to be urgent and clients encouraged to participate. As with other initiatives, the veterinary surgeon has been positioned at the pointy end of information, education and action at farm level.
There has been discussion recently about the need for cattle vets to reduce therapies, increase vaccinations and spend more time on promoting best practice to clients. The question has been raised whether overall practice income from an advisory role will match the loss of sales from drugs.
Andrew recalls that cattle vets have always had to work hard to reduce the work that they do. This appears not to be a philosophical or ethical approach but more a simple fact of working with farmers.
The challenges to cattle practices are very real and the issue of younger vets’ expectations and recruitment need to be identified. However, when asked if there is one particular area of weakness in the vet-farmer advisory role, his reply was “buildings”.
Accepting that he has short legs, Andrew measures paces in yards and strides out cow accommodation as 10 square yards per animal. Many farm buildings are erected to fit a convenient space or to meet a price and many do not match the desired animal space requirement.
The weakest cow is the one just calved and if there is inadequate access to water and food at the right time, while appetite is high, production diseases and susceptibility to disease follow.
The greatest reduction in herd disease has been when a farm has invested in better buildings that match the requirement of the herd. Often the veterinary surgeon is not involved at the planning stages and has to suggest ways of managing smaller groups of animals to overcome problems.
Weak facilities
As vets are moving from farm to farm they pick up a multitude of situations where it is clear that weak facilities are contributing to poor performance. For farmers to tap into that hidden expertise would be a major step forward in disease reduction.
Cattle practices are currently engaging in a BCVA survey of cases due to the Schmallenberg virus. The aim is to achieve a sense of the awareness from practices about the disease, the degree of concern and the geography of incidence. Clinical cases due to bluetongue and BVD can appear similar to Schmallenberg and incidences of milk drop in cattle and congenital defects in sheep are of concern.
The worst case situation for cattle appears to be a drop in production for three to four weeks with a possible effect on subsequent fertility. For sheep, worst case losses of 25% have been recorded where planned breeding has coincided with a high virus hit from midges. Generally, the disease is considered as endemic but of low impact.
The virus crosses the placenta in sheep but probably, due to a longer gestation length, a better opportunity to build up immunity and a usual single occupancy uterus, is not such a problem in cattle. The dangers arise as immune animals are slaughtered, leaving a herd or flock of naïve animals.
There is no direct virus transfer from animal to animal, apart from dam to foetus. Virus transfer is via the midge. It had been thought that this was a new virus, but further work indicated that it is a very old virus that has moved up with animals from Africa. An issue of globalisation rather than global warming.
There has been a very low uptake of vaccine in the UK and currently it appears none is available, although production could commence if there was future demand. The results of the BCVA survey should be available in time to consider the risks for clients in 2017.
