11 Mar 2021
Ruminant Health and Welfare, established to coordinate and focus on the ruminant sector’s drive to tackle endemic diseases across UK, sets four priorities.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
Four key areas have been identified to help improve cattle and sheep production in the UK over the next two years.
Ruminant Health and Welfare (RH&W) is working across the UK’s four nations to coordinate and focus the ruminant sector’s drive in tackling endemic cattle, sheep and goat diseases.
The four areas are:
Launched late last year, the RH&W has been working on its strategy to tackle production issues, including impacts of antibiotic use and greenhouse gas emissions.
From the outset, it said it wanted to be relevant to those caring for livestock on the ground.
RH&W chairman Nigel Miller said: “The initial checklist of potential priorities drew heavily on diseases that have the highest impact on carbon efficiency, a close proxy for production efficiency.
“The development process added several others, some of which were of lower prevalence, but important to some regions and sectors.”
Mr Miller added: “In developing an action plan, the views of those working directly with sheep and cattle will be a primary focus, and interventions will be selected to deliver meaningful gains or to add value to existing initiatives.
“The commitment is to balance both the agenda and group time to ensure similar levels of activity across the sheep and cattle sectors while also supporting other species of farmed ruminants.
“We want to prioritise high-impact diseases which are amenable to intervention and for which there is a gap we could address.”
A working group has been set up to identify a shortlist of diseases or conditions that have a high impact at herd and flock level, but low prevalence nationally.
A workshop is being organised for late spring to discuss how to benchmark welfare status and adopt new approaches.
For more information, visit the RH&W website.
