Beef Expo 2009: Checklist will remove much of the risk from bought-in livestock

Having spent time investigating farmers’ attitudes towards disease, Angus Stovold, an Aberdeen-Angus breeder from Godalming, Surrey, concluded some do not appreciate the risks while others were uncomfortable about quizzing sellers on their herd’s health status.

He set Matt Dobbs, from the Westpoint Veterinary Group, the challenge of developing a one-page, easy-to-use checklist to ‘take the mystery out of buying livestock’.

The checklist works on a traffic light system with red, amber and green tick-boxes for a couple of questions on several topics – membership of health accreditation schemes, on-farm biosecurity and current status for TB, Johne’s, BVD, leptospirosis, IBR and parasites.

Mostly green answers would suggest minimum risk, mostly orange some risk and mostly red significant risk.

When asked about exposing cattle to BVD at shows and sales, Mr Dobbs said there was a ‘very, very small risk’ of a vaccinated animal picking up the virus, not being affected itself but posing a problem for unvaccinated stock.

He recommended isolating stock returning from a show or coming from a sale, but said the greater risk was posed by Persistently Infected (PI) animals.

Describing these PIs as ‘red’, Andrew Curwen, chief executive of XL vets, said ‘knowing the colour’ of the herd was important. Continuing with the BVD example, he said it would be a ‘nightmare’ to bring a red animal into a white/naive herd but equally bad to bring a white animal into a herd with red stock.

He said stock exposed to BVD would ‘turn red’ for 14 days and then go green (natural immunity). The problem was when pregnant cows went green but their unborn calves went red and stayed red all their lives (PIs). He asked farmers to ‘think very carefully’ about buying pregnant females.

• Mr Stovold’s tool will soon be available at www.defra.gov.uk/fhp, www.westpointfarmvets.co.uk and via breed societies.