Overcoming the bad hand dealt by TB breakdown

It’s very difficult to describe the mix of emotions when you go down with TB. You feel anguish and disappointment aplenty, but have no time to dwell on the bad card you have been dealt, because you have to deal with it.

The first thing you have to get used to is a reduced cash flow. You don’t get the milk yield from the cows that have been removed – it may not be much per day, in the scheme of things, but, over time, it mounts up.

Also, you cannot replace those cows because you are closed down until you have a clear test. A few years ago, I wouldn’t contemplate buying cows – having a closed herd was important to me. TB has seen an end to that aspiration – we need to keep cow numbers up to sell enough milk to make the job work.

Next, we need to look at calves. Calf sales are an important part of our income and we know we will not be able to sell any for 120 days, in a best case scenario. We decided to keep all the beef-cross calves, but send all the dairy bull calves for slaughter. We have never slaughtered newborn bulls here and don’t wish to, and I realise by sending them off for someone else to do it, we were just doing it by proxy. These calves are worth £30 to £50 at three weeks old – you could easily spend £150 rearing them and they would still only be worth about £100. It’s not clear if the beef-cross calves will leave a margin, but at least we have kept them alive.

The whole calf-rearing exercise is made more difficult by being organic. Organic feed is so much more expensive than conventional feed, yet no obvious premium for organic calves exists. Organic milk powder is so expensive, it is far better to feed whole milk straight from the cow – although this further erodes the volume you have to sell.

Serious pressure

I know I have highlighted the costs of having TB before, but as long as bTB is an issue, the hardship it causes is very real. Our cash flow is under serious pressure, and going clear on our next test is vital and may give us some respite.

We had six reactors in the first week of October. One was close to calving and had to stay on the farm for two to three weeks. She was paid for quite promptly. However, the other five took four months. They went from here to an abattoir – where else would they go – and would have been paid for quite quickly.

For the Government to take four months to pay you shows a breathtaking indifference to the harsh economic reality of having TB. I know of five dairy herds, besides ours, within a few miles that are closed down with TB. All of these herds are self-contained, closed herds.

Being a closed herd, never buying in stock, is surely the most important biosecurity measure you can take, but it hasn’t done them any good, has it? I have since read the badger population has doubled since they became protected – where else did these infections come from?

I have been reading a book called Double Damned: English Tuberculosis Complex by Trevor Jones. I read it as I would read a novel, from start to finish, but will keep it close to hand and use it as a reference book in future. I often write about TB in cattle, so it’s only fair if I keep the information I use accurate. I don’t pretend to understand it all – that’s probably why I am a simple farmer and not a vet.

It was refreshing to see this contentious subject approached without an agenda – not one I could see, anyway. The amount of research that must have been involved in the production of this book would have been immense.

As that simple farmer, some things stuck out. Occasionally, we get letters in our local press deploring the culling of badgers. I mostly resist the temptation to reply, but this book emphasises the link between TB in cattle and TB in badgers, and the problem escalating when badgers became protected in 1972.

As a farmer, it is frightening to learn my cattle are most at risk when they go back to pasture in spring because badger activity has built up infection over the winter. I love to see my cattle out at grass, but now I am wondering what else they are consuming besides grass.

As that farmer, I had always hoped science would come up with a definitive answer to the problem, but it seems science has come up with a plethora of answers and they don’t all concur. If one subject is as contentious as badger culling, you are able to choose which particular bit of science suits your agenda. The result is about as scientific as the pick-and-mix sweet counter they used to have in Woolworths.

One letter in our local press that particularly irked me said the problem was nothing to do with badgers, but down to poor biosecurity on farms. As a sensible step, it went on, “if you find just one reactor in a herd, then the whole herd should be slaughtered”. I suspect this letter came from a vegan disguised as a badger lover – no other group has an agenda that wants to see the end of livestock farming. That’s the vegans’ Achilles heel – they say such stupid things.

‘Kicking the can’

One thing the book nailed is the possibility of vaccination being the answer. I have no doubt effective vaccination would be an acceptable outcome to all sides of the argument, because it is a benign solution; however, an effective vaccine is not available and an effective means of administering it to badgers is a long way off.

A low-cost oral vaccine could be the answer, but the percentage of badgers covered could be the problem. Vaccination usually works best in young animals, but if cubs are still suckling underground, how do you vaccinate them?

One thing I think puts it all into some sort of context is that in 1960, someone was able to say – the UK cattle population will be TB-free by 1 October. That took 10 years. In 2017, someone said the UK will be TB free by 2038 – that ‘s 21 years. There’s progress for you.

By 2038, my eldest grandson, who wants to be a farmer, will be 46. On our farm – and in our area – TB is the biggest issue. Off the farm, the biggest unknown is Brexit, but we can’t do anything about that – seems we can’t do anything about TB, either. Therefore, TB is destined to be a part of his life for a long time to come. There seems something inherently wrong about that.

The book told me a lot about badgers I didn’t know, which has to be a good thing. It didn’t tell me anything about badgers that made them more endearing – and that remains one of the mysteries of the bTB saga; I call it species preference. I still can’t understand why a large percentage of the population gets so motivated by an animal that is rarely seen, lives an aggressive lifestyle and has doubled its population, yet hare coursers can wipe out hare populations and no one seems bothered.

I think everyone involved with cattle should read this book – and everyone who is anti-badger culling should be made to read it. I feel bitter that TB cleared up in the UK in the 1950s when, as a schoolboy, I started working on farms. Here we are today, and it’s a problem again after all this time.

As politicians agonise over Brexit, you often hear them use the analogy “kicking the can down the road”, meaning inactivity. Was ever a can kicked further?