WHAT follows is a lengthy and detailed letter from Cardiganshire farmer Tom Harris, who is calling for an independent inquiry into the handling of an outbreak at his dairy farm - it's lost almost 800 cattle to bovine tuberculosis since mid-December.
He has also issued an open invitation to farmers and wildlife groups to a meeting in March to discuss what happens next on the farm: should it re-stock? Will bTB simply re-emerge? What steps can he take to prevent more cattle becoming infected?
The Badger Trust replied to his invitation by outlining a number of points and observations. This is Mr Harris's response to the Trust - it's illustrative of the terrible dilemmas that many farmers in Wales now face.....
THANK you very much for your reply, and your sympathy regarding our losses. As with the replies we have made to many other people who have been so kind as to offer their views on this matter, I can assure you that we have no hidden agenda in inviting all interested parties to a "full and frank discussion" on the problem of bTB on our farm.
We have a number of very important financial and emotional decisions to make here regarding the future of keeping cattle at Ffosyficer and want as much advice as is possible regarding the potential bTB risk to new cattle before any are purchased.
The main purpose of this meeting is therefore to look at whether the various parties can assess how best, if at all, we can bring clean cattle onto a clean farm.
As farmers we find ourselves surrounded with an enormous amount of conflicting data, which, I have no doubt, contributes to the inability of the current regime to have any effect on controlling and preventing the occurrence of the disease in the UK.
Whilst in the one corner, so to speak, yourselves state that "scientific evidence is clear: killing badgers can make no meaningful contribution to TB control", in the other corner are scientists with referenced scientific data to show, that in some cases, the removal of badgers leads to a decrease the occurrence of bTB in cattle, suggesting that badgers were acting as an important primary host of infection.
All in all, and speaking as a scientist, the scientific evidence certainly is not clear, hence the request to speak to all interested parties, and gather advice on farm, where all can see the system we have in place.
In this regard, we are much obliged for some of your advice regarding how we proceed to restock, and the undeniable risk of bringing in infected stock onto our premises.
It does match the advice that Animal Health officials have given us and we would certainly employ a skin test, as required pre-movement, and voluntarily post-movement and will look at the possibility of independent gamma-interferon tests.
Even on this matter however, we have discrepancies in opinion. Whereby some vets claim the tests between them are only 70% effective at detecting bTB, whilst others including yourselves claim they are 99.7% effective in picking up infection!
Yet again this shows us differing opinion. This could surely be dealt with by proper scientific appraisal.
Your questions follow many of those published by MAFF in "The role of cattle husbandry in the development of a sustainable policy to control M.Bovis in cattle", a report we have read and which we have been referred to, and have been assessed by Animal Health in the past as part of a risk assessment.
You are quite correct with your research into our farm and confirm that we have considerably increased both in hectarage and cattle numbers over the last few years.
At present, we have two separate dairy herds, one in Ffosyficer, Abercych (370 milking cows; the large outbreak, Dec 08) and the other in Ffynnonwen, Blaenwaun (190 milking cows; 11 reactors at last skin test, Jan 09).
These herds are run completely separately, including associated youngstock. As Ffynnonwen is an entity in its own right, I'll concentrate on giving you the farm details for Ffosyficer.
Ffosyficer has been under TB restriction since 2001 (at this time we had approx. 250 milking cows). Since then we have had on average 3 tests per year, and up until this outbreak we were losing 25-30 head per year (a small number displaying lesions at post-mortem analysis).
The current large numbers of reactors, the majority of which displayed lesions, are either milking cows or young calves at Ffosyficer.
Outlying blocks seem relatively unaffected. All our testing has been done by the skin test until very recently. The remaining animals on our holding have undergone a blood test over the last two weeks.
As with yourselves, we agree that there are serious concerns about these tests. I am sure all parties are in agreement that the current testing regime is not sufficient to control, let alone eradicate this disease. We would wholeheartedly support any changes to the testing regime that are backed up with scientific evidence.
As a background, Ffosyficer was run as a commercial dairy farm until 1999 when we decided to convert to organic production. We saw that as conventional milk prices were tumbling, and input costs rising there was a need to change our system to meet our financial needs.
This meant either becoming more intensive, producing more milk, housing cattle and purchasing feed or looking at organic farming, a far less intensive way of farming, but one in which there is a higher price on the product.
Given that we also had major concerns about the direction of conventional farming on our farm and a genuine concern for the environment we saw the organic route as the obvious option.
Our basic farming system, like that of the majority of dairy farms in this area, organic or non-organic, is to graze milking cows by summer and house milking cows by winter.
Organic rules stipulate that housing is kept to a minimum in order to allow cows to graze naturally for as long as possible.
Further, the majority of food (at least 60%) is obtained from forage. This means that we keep the grazing around the home farm for the milking cows in order to avoid housing until when absolutely necessary.
As we have developed the farm, we know that Ffosyficer can graze 350 cows from March through to October/November, and this was our dairy stock at the time of the outbreak.
Youngstock are grazed and winter feed stuffs are produced on off-lying land, all of which is rented by only ourselves. Animal Health has deemed this acceptable and have assessed boundaries with neighbouring farms.
We are not a closed herd, and have bought cattle in with the full authority of Animal Health. The numbers are small (and are in nearly all cases young bulls for breeding), but may of course be of importance.
These are kept in isolation after arrival, pending post-movement tests. All new cattle have been tested TB-free at pre- and post-movement testing.
We do not really understand how the rapid growth of the business per se has led to the large TB breakdown we have suffered.
From my understanding, small farms as well as large farms in this area suffer with bTB. However we do agree with your point, as would any veterinarian, that bTB can be spread from cattle to cattle and may indeed have contributed to the recent positive bTB cows in our herd.
We take some umbrage at the comment that local observers view our system as a complex operation without attempting to understand what we are doing.
One of the criticisms we have of many bodies involved in arguing their particular point on the spread of bTB is their ability to draw conclusions without ever studying the data!
Personally, we view a smaller mixed farm with numerous enterprises in many ways far more complex. Our system is simple enough to give ourselves and our staff a good standard of living , working with happy, 'healthy' livestock to give us all a lot of pleasure.
This is vital, as the future of farming is unsustainable if farmers are asked to work long hours on small mixed farms to make a meagre living, as many undoubtedly still do.
And so back to the badger question and their role in bTB transmission. Personally, as mentioned previously, we have no hidden agenda with regard to this issue, and would like to hear the arguments on both sides to enable us to introduce clean cattle onto clean land.
From the literature review I have thus far carried out, it does not seem a clear scenario to myself. There does not seem to be a specific, randomised trial, which has been scientifically referenced and published to confirm that badgers or any other species infected with bTB which co-exist with confirmed TB-free cows both on pasture or indoors does or does not result in bTB infection of the cattle.
The fact that yourselves and the government deem it important to prevent badger access to cattle housing suggest that they may be able to pass it on in those conditions. In this regard we will of course increase the 'badger-proofness' of our buildings if stock are to be re-introduced, and thank you for your advice.
However in our case, where animals graze for 9-10 months of the year, we are still uncertain whether they may pick it up from pasture. It would seem appropriate to prevent badger access to all feed that we supply to our cattle in order to eliminate the risk of bTB.
We did note your comment that the risk of transmission from pasture is negligible and would be indebted if you could provide us with that scientific paper.
One obvious study we have thought of, would be to study the badger populations around our farm. There is a non-invasive test, which has been developed by Warwick University. This test studies the dung or urine around badger setts and can confirm whether badgers in that sett have bTB.
We realise the test is still in its development stages, but surely it may be of use in furthering your case that badgers do not pass on bTB to cows.
Of course, I understand that this does not rule out the fact that cattle may have passed bTB to badger populations. However if these setts were free of bTB it would show that they are a very unlikely source of our outbreak and thus give us a lot more confidence to restock.
In this regard, we would like to see the Badger Trust, and associated bodies working with us to prove our badgers are not giving our cows bTB.
In the 60 years that we have farmed at Ffosyficer, we have never been approached by any wildlife body to map setts on our land and monitor movements of badgers across our pastures.
It would surely make your case stronger if you could show us that badger-cow interaction was minimal on our farm.
Further, it would show us you have a genuine interest in the badgers in our surrounding area, and could help us considerably if you deem a sett is infected with bTB which is having a detrimental effect on the health of that sett.
We are proud of both our farm animals and our wild animals in this beautiful area of Wales and reason that successful livestock farming in today's climate must take into account the health and welfare of both these types of stock.
We do worry about the present of diseased wildlife in our woodlands, and there is no doubt that badgers or any other animals harbouring TB from whatever source die a long and lingering death.
We deem this unacceptable, and given the virulence of this disease in passing from animal-to-animal I think it is in the interest of all concerned to remove bTB from both farm animals and wild animals.
We also worry about the human health factor surrounding diseased farms and the associated environment. There is clear evidence that sputum, faeces and urine from infected stock, be they badgers or cattle, can transmit bTB to humans.
We have been advised to take extra precautions in the milking parlour for ourselves and our staff, and consider it appropriate to warn the public about the risks around our farm be it from our own cattle or the wildlife.
Yes it may be overcautious, and yes, there are other diseases that I'm sure can be transmitted in this situation, but to deem our thoughts as 'utter nonsense' is not particularly helpful when it comes to dealing with risks to human health.
We hope that this letter clarifies our situation and how are hopes are to gather as much information as possible in our quest to decide how or if to restock our farm with cattle.
Thanks again for your reply. We feel that there is some serious animosity that exists between farmers and wildlife groups on this issue, and a lack of dialogue only enhances this and leads to distrust.
We will let you know in due course how we plan to bring all parties together for a "full and frank discussion" on how to bring clean animals onto a clean farm. This will probably be in March after all the results of blood tests/post-mortems have been received.
We do not want it to turn into a finger-wagging session, but rather a constructive meeting to iron out how we go forward here. It is in all our interests to rid bTB from this area before it rids cattle, badgers and farmers themselves. This, I hope you agree would not be in the best interests of the Welsh countryside.
Yours,
Tom Harris
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