I still come across farms that have made no provision for things like fires, floods or other natural disasters, and even less preparation to manage outbreaks of disease both endemic diseases (already present in Australia) and exotic diseases (diseases not currently in Australia).
Australia is a country where natural disasters are almost inevitable, and I strongly recommend making your planning for such events part of your animal health and animal welfare plans.
Back-up generators to power the dairy so cows can continue to be milked if the power grid is damaged or unavailable, in my opinion, is an essential animal health and welfare requirement on a dairy farm.
Many milk processors offer loans or grants to assist producers with this cost.
As severe weather events either cause damage to the power grid or necessitate it being temporarily shut down for safety reasons, not being able to pump water for drinking, cow cooling or even fire suppression is also a very serious breach of our animal welfare obligations.
Power failure can also make things like electric fencing and our animal health collars not work — you can only imagine what the impact of a multi-day power outage would be around peak lactation or at the very start of mating.
When I am creating an animal welfare plan for a farm, we focus a lot on things like pain management, staff training and monitoring health outcomes — but I am increasingly focusing on discussions about preparing for and making good plans to mitigate the effects of natural disasters and climate events.
In many cases, this does require considering investment in farm infrastructure projects like cow cooling, water supply, power back-up and farm planning to reduce risks of introduction of diseases and ensure that our farm would continue to be serviceable if a significant disease event was to occur.
Some exotic diseases are what we know as emergency animal diseases (EADs) and they include serious concerns like foot and mouth disease (FMD) and lumpy skin disease (LSD), which are both currently on our doorstep.
I have a pessimistic view of our ability to exclude these serious diseases from our dairy farms should they breach our border security.
Largely this is not because of the failure of our industry and government services to prepare, but mainly because I see very few individual farms who have made any significant investment in their disease management plans — and they have virtually none of the infrastructure that would be required to manage a serious disease incursion in our country.
Australia leads the world in our big picture planning for emergency animal diseases with superb resources like our AUSTVETPLAN and with cost sharing and resourcing agreements like EADRA that lay out the roadmap for how we would respond to, and fund the response to, an emergency animal disease.
However, I can count on zero fingers the number of dairy farms that I visit in Australia where I can even get to and from my car without cross contamination, and no dairy farms provide clothing or boots for visitors or guests to wear when coming into contact with their herd.
In fact, there are many farms I visit where cows and vehicles share the same tracks and most have common vehicle access for feed deliveries, livestock transport or movement and milk collection.
In an outbreak of an EAD, initially a movement standstill would occur that would mean no movement of feed, livestock or milk. I don’t believe many farms have a sufficient understanding of how this would impact their operation and the health and welfare of their animals.
If a farm has common areas where vehicles like milk tankers cross paths with livestock, it would be highly likely that the collection of milk would have to stop because the risk of spread would be too high.
I sometimes ask people: do you know what your milk factory’s planning is regarding milk collection if there were an outbreak of an EAD, and would your farm be compliant with their requirements to continue to be collected even if the outbreak was on the other side of the country?
It is important for you to have these discussions with your factory field staff and your herd health vet, and I encourage dairy producers to take a proactive approach to creating animal health and welfare plans that consider risks to their herd.
Dr Rob Bonanno is a ProDairy lead herd health veterinarian based in Gippsland.
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