Thank you very much, and thank you to all those at Webinar that for this opportunity, and to those speakers who have gone before Ali Gwen and Nikki for their fantastic talks. So I'm gonna do a little bit about practical solutions to TB control, and looking at how we can help our clients, with this financially crippling disease. So as a brief overview.

I'm gonna cover a bit of revision into, bovine TB, what it is, what causes it, risk pathways for transmissions, what strategies we can take to prioritise risks, how we can reduce them, and then a little bit about where to get more information and the TB Advisory service. So bovine TB is almost always caused by the bacteria, mycobacterium bovis. It's very similar to the bacteria that causes human TB, and it's characteristic of the mycobacteria family in that, it's developed a number of strategies to allow it to be both resilient to the environment and persistent within animal population.

There are a couple of those in particular, it has a waxy cell wall, which, allows it to survive outwith the animal hosts for quite some time periods. A recent study work done in the state showed that Mbos outside an animal can still be viable after 2 years. And it undergoes various intracellular stages of, of reproduction within the body, which means that the body doesn't mount a suitable immune response to it.

Causes slow growing disease, but is also highly contagious, so it has a, a low requirement for an infective dose to cause disease. And as I said, is a, is a relative of the mycobacterium tuberculosis complex that's responsible for most TB in humans. So it is a multi-species disease and can cause disease in any mammal, which I'll come to in a in a bit, but the reason we control it is because it's zoonotic.

Although that is under a relatively high degree of control, with only 32 human cases seen in 2015. The human cases coming either from recrudescence of infection acquired many years ago. Movement of people, from their, from those where TB bovine TB is less well controlled, into the UK.

Or certain specific at-risk groups or those with immune suppression, so those drinking unpasteurized milk off farms, diabetics, young children, people undergoing chemotherapy, or as is unfortunately seen with TB across the world, those infected with HIV. Controlling this country pri primarily through skin testing and meat hygiene and then pasteurisation of of products, trying to reduce the amount of mycobacterium bovis going into the human food chain. The TB comes under devolved control, so England, Scotland and Wales have have their own ability to, set down legislation around control.

But it all comes underneath, an EU Council directive, so 64432 EEC, and in England comes under the Tuberculosis England Order 2014. That is relevant because, as we are heading over closer towards Brexit, it means that there is the potential for control measures to be changed. And some things that were not within our armoury before may well become within our armoury, but equally, there are financial implications with regards to control.

In 2013, England set out a 25 year eradication strategy, based around three specific management areas, the high risk edge and low risk areas, as set out in this map. Each of those 4 areas, sorry, 3 areas. Each of those three areas, has, specific measures put in place to try and control the disease.

So in the high risk and edge areas, that's around eradicating disease from already infected birds, whilst preventing, protecting those herds that are uninfected. In the low risk area, it's about preventing, import of the disease primarily, as well as early detection. So number one is surveillance.

So as mentioned earlier, it's statutory skin testing together with sort out surveillance, and those are are. Put into place in the different areas in slightly different ways, and that's an ever, changing scenario as government brings in new policies. So for example, from January 2020, all herds in the high risk area will be six monthly testing unless their checks areredited or have been clear of TB for a specified amount of time.

So it's worth keeping up to date with the government website to see what new control measures are being placed in that regard. Number 2, breakdown management, which again is, is common across all three areas. And this is about trying to get rapid resolution of breakdowns and removing infected cattle, so trying to remove that, that sort of infection for other animals.

I'm gonna skip on to 4, measure 4, which is other disease prevention, which again is common across all three areas, and that's about looking at biosecurity, and risk-based trading is ultimately just one form of biosecurity. And this is where the TV advisory service fits and also where the, the majority of this talk is gonna sit sit in and around. And then measure 3 is reduced the risk of TB spread from badgers, which obviously primarily is is targeted around the high risk in the edge areas, and the low risk area apart from, an area around Shap in Cumbria and potentially a couple of pockets in Kent and Essex, it's unlikely that there's significant levels, levels of TB in the wildlife population.

So measures there definitely concentrate around the cattle transmission. So there are a number of different PB transmission pathways that we need to consider. So there is spread between herds, from cattle to cattle.

There's spread within herds, cattle to cattle, and then there's spread between cattle herds and wildlife population, primarily badgers. And then within that, so between cattle you've got direct transmission, so no to those, those faeces, etc. You have indirect transmission through primarily through faeces or common areas of feeding and drinking.

And then when you're looking at wildlife, you've got two distinct areas in the buildings and yards and in the pasture, and again that can be indirect or direct. The cattle to cattle spread, what we're looking at is a situation, a local spread where there is spread from, from infected cattle to uninfected cattle within a herd. So that circulating disease within a herd, infectious cattle, spreading the disease, primarily where there are areas of close contact, so housed during the winter, potentially where housing conditions are, are less than optimum, leading to, a degree of immune suppression, and or areas where cattle generally congregate so the water troughs and the feed space.

You can also get local cattle to cattle spread through nose to nose contact across fences, as well as straying livestock. And, that relates to your neighbour's livestock as much as it relates to yours. It's one of the questions that we ask and when carrying out TB advisory visit is how often do your neighbour's stock escape onto your land before asking how often do your stock escape onto your neighbour's land.

And it's amazing how frequently. People rarely admit that their stock escape, that their neighbour's stock are escaping onto their land all the time. Ultimately, if there's an opportunity for cattle to get onto your land that shouldn't be there, that's as much your responsibility to sort as it is your neighbor's.

And then you have an environmental risk, but not, and here I'm not talking about wildlife. So, there's been a large number of studies recently looking at mycobacterium by survive in the environment, and, as I said, it has these resilience methods that allow it to survive longer than most bacteria in the environment. And, and we need to consider this when we're considering TB control.

So the major one that I want to pick up on is cattle faeces in the environment with the survival of 2 to 6 months and stalled slurry with the survival of up to 6 months. And that is an up to 6 months. The reality is that, if you are, if you have super excretas that are passing out large volumes of, faeces with large, infected loads of mycobacterium bovis, and this is then getting spread on your fields, not only is it a really good way of, increasing the risk to your cattle population if they go and graze relatively soon afterwards.

But potentially a risk for spreading it to the wildlife population. Anybody who's heard, Dick Sibley speak recently will have heard about his work with the age test and about how actually removing some of these super excretas from the herds and the risk that, primarily their slurry pose, can be a significant, significant tool in trying to eradicate the disease from persistent breakdowns. The bottom two silage and manure, it's in theory they are possible, but it's likely that both the temperatures and the VAs, that, silage and farm yard manure reach will kill most mycobacteria.

So then we have distinct cattle to cattle spread, which is about trading of animals, movement of animals. We have a farming industry that relies on to a greater or lesser extent, the movement of animals between herds and between areas. And when animals move, they obviously pose a risk of, transmission of disease, as Nicky would have said earlier in the BVD talk about the risk of purchasing in persistently infected animals or active BVD, we need to start thinking about TB in similar lines.

But we pre-movement tests, so surely that's controlling the, the risk of transmission. Well, yes, to some degree. So with the, with the skin test that we're using, the comparative cervical test, we have a specificity of 99.98%.

So that means for every 10,000 uninfected animals we test, two of them will test positive. For a biological test, that, that is fantastic. That is a, a really phenomenal performance.

And despite the, the many stories that go out there about having so many reactors, and there was a, an article on Southeast Farmer recently from a farmer who had 33 reactors and none of them had TB. The reality is in most of these cases, those animals do have TB certainly where there are multiple reactors at a herd level, the positive predictive value is incredibly high. It's just that disease is still at a microscopic stage and won't be, won't be found by .

By postmortem in the slaughterhouse. The downside to the skin test and the pre-movement test is the sensitivity is somewhere between 50 and 80%. 80% was the historic numbers that were presented by APHA.

There's been some more recent studies that suggest it may be as low as 50%. So this means that false negatives are ultimately more common, especially if we're only small cohorts as we do with remoment. So somewhere between 1 in 2 and 1 in 5 infected animals are missed by the skin test.

So if you have heard that there's a persistent breakdown that has two clear short interval tests. That herd still presents a significant risk if you're purchasing animals off off that herd. So as with any trade, it's, it's buyer beware, it's the risk sits on the buyer, not on the seller in the in these circumstances.

But we have a tool called IBTB, so this was a, this is a, a free to use government resource that is updated once Fortnite, as you can see, on the left hand side, this download was taken before Christmas. But it's updated once a Fortnite and is effectively live. I, I, centred it in, in this specific area because I'm currently sat smack bang in the middle of there.

But each of these blue dots indicates an ongoing TB breakdown. Now what we, we have the ability to do is click on each of those dots. And with the tool you can present the maps in different ways.

You can look topographically like this, so you can see any particular valleys that are there, streams which may present wildlife risks. You can use satellite imagery, etc. And you can click on any specific breakdown and you can see the start of the breakdown and the end of the breakdown.

Now when this comes to, when we're looking at trading, we can, you can also look historically for any breakdown up to 5 years in the last 5 years. So you've got the ability to look and see, has the hood that you're purchasing from had a recent breakdown, at what stage was that breakdown? Were the restrictions released?

What's the duration of the breakdown? Have they had historic breakdowns before that? You can also look at the risk potentially presented from the surrounding area.

So this is an area down in Cornwall, and you can see within that screen there is a considerable number of ongoing TB breakdowns in a relatively small area. So anything from within this area, you would need to pay due consideration if you're looking to purchase from. And when you compare this, which is slightly further north than the previous, than, than the first slide of IBTB, you can see that we have a large area here with no ongoing TB breakdowns.

So these, herds from that area would probably present significantly lower risk. And this is just back to the original image. So, yeah, it's just .

To show that. So, this, we need to be aware of the fact that when we're looking at environmental spread between cattle and wildlife, we are not solely talking about badgers. This is a study carried out in the southwest of England, looking at the prevalence of TB in various different wild mammals, excluding badgers.

And as you'll see here, munjack deer present the highest, prevalence in, in wild mammals at about 5%, pole cats at 4%, and then varying other degrees down from there. They've, they've managed to isolate bovine TB from pretty much every wild mammal, and some, and obviously most domestic mammals as well. Recent outbreaks in domestic cats, and then the, outbreak at the Kimballwick hunt as well recently in, in dogs there.

What the study also tried to do is to ascribe each of these wild mammals with a, with a relative risk compared with badgers of transmission to the cattle population. So as much as a grey squirrel may have a prevalence of milk or er, there isn't much overlap between the grey squirrel population and the cattle population. Pretty rare that they would be in the same area and all their, their excretia would be in the same area, whereas obviously badgers, there is quite a large amount of overlap and also some, some deer.

So they perceive that the greatest risk outside of badgers from wildlife comes from the social grazing deer, so the rowan fallow deer, although we know in some other countries, red deer can be so Michigan in the United States, red deer are the major wildlife reservoir there. Deer are also the major wildlife reservoir in southern Spain, where, they have a very interesting scenario in that they're quite happy shooting animals in southern Spain, but the problem is they like to shoot the deer for money, and they have a large hunting population, so they like to maintain deer numbers, which then doesn't necessarily correlate very well with disease control. So how, what happens when we compare that with badger prevalence, so there is no national figure for TB prevalence in badgers, and ultimately it depends on which tests you use and whether those tests you use in series or in parallel.

The results of the Krebs trial, the RBCT trial suggests that between 16 and 33%, so a 6th and a third of cold badges were infected. The chart on the right are estimates from Woodchester Park using a variety of testing methodologies, and again that shows between 15 and 37% prevalence, and the recent Cheshire Roadkill survey estimates 21% prevalence of badgers in Cheshire. So when you compare those with the previous figures, 5% for munch check beer, when you look at herd prevalence levels in cattle, even in the most densely infected counties of around 13, 14% at a herd level, you can see that actually the, the prevalence of it in infected badgers in in the high risk area is probably far higher than any species, and would potentially pose the question whether we've termed it right in terms of bovine TB or whether the bees potentially stand for badger TB.

So then we have to look at transmission risks from wildlife to cattle and equally back from cattle to wildlife because the, the target is TB eradication, not just TB eradication from the cattle population. There's been recent studies showing direct notice to make content past year isn't that common. Some work carried out in Northern Ireland showed where it is, where it does happen.

It's generally younger cattle that are a bit more inquisitive. If you ever see any pictures like the one on the top here, it's likely that that's either been photoshopped or as in this case, that is a stuffed badger that the cow is going and sniffing. Indirect contact in the past presents a much higher risk.

So we're looking primarily at badger latrines and faeces and badger sects, and then to a lesser extent urine and sputum. But where sputum does present the highest risk is where it's concentrated in an area, so around water troughs or around feed and mineral licks, and I'm on a one man mission to make sure that the picture on the right, bottom right, is a thing of the past with, feeding cattle on the ground. A because it's a waste, and B because it is a significant biosecurity risk.

So when we look at feed troughs and whether they're accessible to badgers, this is a bit of work that was carried out, 1520 years ago. So with a liftable trough, so the troughs on legs, and has little pins in it, so you can lift it in 5 centimetre increments, put some feed out there, watch the badgers come and, come and, eat it. Lift it 5 centimetres and see how many can access it.

What they effectively found is all but the most agile of, of young cubs, and that's the reason cubs can get higher is they are more agile, similar to people. I used to be able to climb higher when I was 17 than I can now. All but the most agile of cubs, a trough at 1 metre high will prevent them accessing it.

So obviously we also have a transmission risk in buildings and yards. So there are some studies that show that badgers enter, plenty of studies showing that badgers enter farm yards and buildings. This can occur all year round, but it generally occurs when badgers don't have their primary food source, which is earthworms.

So when the ground goes hard and they can't dig overly easily, they will go looking for other food sources, and that's when you, you'll generally get them entering buildings and yards. And when they're in, there's a significant opportunity for both direct and indirect transmission of TB. So why do they visit farmyards?

Primary reason is, is feed substances. So if you look at the table on the right, what we've got here is mainly sugary or starchy based feeds. They're not particularly as, as, omnivores, they're not particularly big fans of, forage based.

Feeds, so straw, hay, haulage, silage, but they are big, big fans of starch and sugar. So maize and cereal silage, molasses, protein pellets, bread waste, etc. There's a variety of feed materials in farmyards will attract badges in.

It's also why they visit the feed stores more often than they'll visit sheds and clamps. They will sometimes go to collect hay or straw for bedding. They, they build these multi-chambered sets under the ground, and they, and they like to bring in suitable amounts of bedding to make them as comfortable as possible.

Or, as has been found in a number of cases, they might just be travelling from A to B and the farm might be on their route. So this is a little video here in a feed store. The video should stop there we go, of a badger having a nice scratch.

So this was a video at Winchester Park, which is a large badger research centre in Gloucester, which is why the badger has got a collar on, as you can see. It also looks to me like it's got some fairly large swellings, potentially, infected lymph nodes. Under its jaw, and that badger is currently sat on a massive grain heap in the middle of a feed store on a dairy farm.

So farmer's gonna come in the next day, pick up a load of that grain, spread it out in front of the cattle, obviously a significant risk for transmission. Second video here again in a feed store and I'm hoping it's coming through OK. If you look to the right of the bags, you can see a number of badges in there around.

So given that badges work in non-familiar, non-cooperative social groups, it's unusual to see this many badges in one place, and then. In a minute, there's gonna be a loud noise. Come through there, all the badges lift their heads up, obviously something startled them.

They scurry away, and then there's another load of badgers come. So there's about, there's about 15 to 18 badgers in this feed store. Now obviously that's not necessarily necessarily saying those badges are infected with bovine TB.

Equally, it's not a particularly good use of your feed. And then 3rd video here. You see the badger coming through the gate on the right hand side.

You've got a stop bull in the in the pen there. A badger comes along, has a little sniff of the ball, ball has a little sniff of the badger, and then goes on his own way. So this kind of behaviour implies that neither the bull nor the badger are overly concerned about each other, so this is probably a daily occurrence.

And this is at 5 to 10. In the middle of summer, so you can see that it's still daylight outside. So the, the vast majority of badger visits occur at night, they're generally nocturnal animals, but this is middle of the day, and those animals are in relatively close contact to each other.

So despite the fact some recent studies show that badgers rarely visit buildings, although those studies were based on placing collars on relatively low numbers of badgers. It was an APHA study carried out by Andy Robertson that found that 41% of farm yards had obvious visitation of badgers, and that was, I believe, a two week study period. On each farm, and some of those farms have badges in over 70% of survey nights.

So there's obviously a significant risk of transmission both ways, both from the cattle to the badger population and from the badger to the cattle population. So we know transmission occurs both ways. What we don't know is how much TB is caused by badgers.

So this is a bit of work that Crystal Donnelly did trying to pull from the, the Krebstro work, what proportion in the high risk area of TB outbreaks were caused by badgers. And the work suggested that it's only 6% caused directly by by badgers, badger to cattle transmission, although obviously there's a fairly wide confidence interval there. But the ongoing risk of, of then that cattle breakdown spreading to other cattle herds brings the overall contribution of wildlife to cattle TV breakdowns to 52%.

Which conveniently ties in with a 50% reduction or 54% reduction in cattle TB incidents 18 months after culling in the RBCT. And also the most recent results that have come from the sunset and the Gloucester cull areas are showing an a reduction in the raw. This is raw stats are not comparative yet, so.

Care needs to be taken with interpretation, but a reduction in the incidence in those two cull areas of around 50% after the 4th year of culling, with no significant increase in the 2 kilometre, border, around it. So we, we now know how TB can be transmitted from herds, be that or from social groups of badgers. What we need to think about from the cattle perspective now is how we prioritise the risk for an individual farm.

So because it's, it's obviously important to target interventions where they're most likely to be beneficial, which is a common theme throughout this morning, and we have a number of tools to help us try and prioritise that. The first thing we should be looking at is the TVB history of a, of a unit. So which animals are going down when you have breakdowns?

How many breakdowns have you had? Is it specific management groups? Is it specific animals that have been brought in?

What's the management of those groups, and it can give you an indication, not 100% certain, but it can give you an indication where the risk may lie. You can then use IBTB, so the mapping software to, to support that. Is there a significant local risk?

Are you buying from places where there is a significant local risk? Use your BCMS records as well to look at purchase history, what animals are being brought in, and then use your eyes as well. Is there any evidence of wildlife in the cattle areas?

Are there opportunities for wildlife to come in? So and this is just a couple of ways of thinking about things that we use in the TV advisory service is to, to break things down into different categories and to try and apply relative risk to them. So, wildlife, so badger transmission, is it purchases, is it neighbours?

Are you getting significant strain of neighbours' stock or, or insufficient boundaries between them and your neighbours are consistently down? And then if those two, those three are all relatively under good control, you start looking at the, the, the bottom two, so slurry or recrudescence of latent disease as a potential risk. Another way of looking at it is trading your, your biggest risk, and does that relate to purchases or what happens after they're purchased?

Is the field environment, the major risk is that wildlife or cattle, and, and is the infrastructure a major risk? Is that housing or is that feed and forage? So it's just a, a couple of pointers to try and break things down.

What a number of our advisors will do is they'll go with one of those two lists, and they'll try and apply percentages to each of them to try and target areas for, for intervention. And it is all about reducing risk. It's, it's not about aiming for perfection, as it never is with with disease control for an endemic disease.

It's about reducing the risk of transmission, and anything you can do to reduce that risk will be beneficial, but you obviously want to target that where it's gonna have the biggest impact. We're looking at trading, markets obviously present a significant risk. There's a number of animals going through a market where we have next to no information about the history of those animals.

And as Nikki said about how beneficial it would be to have cards on the gates for for those animals that are certified BVD free at a market, how fantastic would it be to have a, a, a card at a market showing when that herd's last breakdown was. This is part of the risk-based trading initiative that Bethro were trying to push through, unfortunately it hit a bit of a stumbling block with some of the markets, and it's, it's still an aspiration rather than a, an actuality at the moment. But a number of, as I say, a number of animals come through, you don't know what's likely to be there until you get there, and when you get there, you don't know where they've come from.

Obviously those cattle don't have TB because they look fantastically healthy. Large tongue in cheek, they walk through the ring, you have no idea whether they have TB or not. Similarly, dispersal sales, you've got a question as far as I'm concerned, why, why a herd is dispersing.

And sometimes when you go back and look at dispersal sals, and you get the CPH number and look on IBTB, you find you've got a herd that's been under TB restrictions for the last 7 years that's just gone clear as having a dispersal sale. Now, from my perspective, those animals are massively high risk and should be avoided where possible. So when we're looking at buying animals, because ultimately, as I said earlier, we do have a cat industry that relies on trading, what we need to think about is a few of these golden rules.

Do you need to buy animals in? Can you change your breeding policy to reduce the number of animals that you need to buy in? Can you breed more heifers if you're a dairy farmer, so you don't need to buy in?

Can you have a look at AI if you're a beefer to, to reduce the requirement to, to buy bulls in. Have a, have a look and, and consider whether that's something you can do. I admit in many cases it's aspirational, but I still think we should aspire to be as good as possible.

If you are buying in, buy from the places where you can check as much as as much first as possible. So instead of considering standard auction markets, have a look at different opportunities. So asking auctioneers, they may have batches of cattle that you can go and get, gather more information from private sales.

Sell My Livestock is a is an online website where again you've got the ability to just check out some of this information first. And then go and have a look on IBTB and have a look at the history of the farm and the area around the farm. When you're buying in, little and often is about the worst that you can do.

I'm sure we all have clients who like to go down the market every week and come back with 1 or 2 animals. Now, every single one of those 1 or 2 animals presents a, a, a significant risk versus buying a large cohort from a single farm. And if you are buying in the younger the better, EB risk increases with age, the sooner you can get those animals on the better.

But then also, if you are going to buy, let's have a think about what we're going to do when we buy them in. And given what I said earlier about the sensitivity and specificity of the test, have a consideration as to whether we could isolate and post movement test those animals before they, they enter the main hood. It won't stop you going down under TV restrictions, but what it will do is minimise the risk of spread within the herd prior to those animals being identified and consider the use of private gamma testing.

So in comparative numbers, private gamma testing is, is 96, 97% specific. So there's more collateral damage. The the sensitivity is lifted up to about 95%, so it's, you're more likely to pick up an animal with early infection.

But then what can you do about the field environment and again I've split this into badges and cattle. It is possible to exclude badgers from past. It's likely to be very difficult and it's likely to be incredibly expensive to cheap.

So you can do this in one of two ways. You can do it using an electric fence, or you can do it using high tensile steel fencing. Standard stop fencing will not do the job, they will just bury underneath it.

So, top left picture, this is somebody who's tried to exclude badgers from his whole farm, laid a track of concrete and has got an electric fence running along that track of concrete to, to, . Keep the badgers out. I'll come to some badger proof fencing requirements in a bit, but the reality is it it's probably gonna be too expensive for most farmers to exclude badgers from their entire farm.

What you can do is you can stop cattle accessing sets or latrines. So, as I said earlier, these are the two major, points of transfer of disease. Sets are relatively easy to identify by wandering around and looking at them.

There are a number of, of, of ways of determining what's a badger set versus a fox or, or rabbits, and also whether it's active or, and, and if it is active, whether it's active through badgers. A large number of badger sets, if the, if the badgers die out, they'll get repopulated with rabbits. So, and latrines equally slightly harder to spot, but, but equally obvious when they are found and where they are found, and more often than not they are along hedgerows or fence fence boundaries.

So you can exclude cattle from, sets and latrines, so those centres of, high density of bovine TB, using electric fencing, permanent fencing, temporary fencing, but they do need regular maintenance. It is illegal to exclude badgers from going back to their sets. And equally it's probably quite futile because they will just go and find somewhere else to, to have a home.

Excluding badges from latrines or destroying latrines will not work because ultimately defecating is in that function and they need to do it and they'll just dig another latrine somewhere else. So making changes to feeding practises is a significant thing that the farming industry needs to consider with regards to TB control. So, we should be looking to discourage this feeding the pasture as much as possible, and I know that we need to feed animals to get maximum performance, but consider different methods of feeding.

Could we be feeding them in the yard, bringing them off the pasture into the yard to feed them? Could we be looking at other, other methodologies around that? But accepting the fact that the majority of times we do need to feed stock out in the field, what we should be doing is looking to use raised or modified troughs or mineral lips.

So, troughs should ideally have, angled sides, but both of the pictures at the bottom. There's a very limited amount there for a badger to climb up, and they could employ the rollers I've seen on the bottom left. So any badger that does try and jump up will struggle to scrabble over it.

The best troughs are gonna be relatively deep as well, so that the feed is never kept near to the top. What we should also be looking at doing is whether is is feeding to intake rather than having ad-lib ad-lib feeding practises only put out in the field what's likely to be consumed between then and the next time you go to put more out. Mineral licks, so these molas mineral lick buckets, as far as I'm concerned, they're like crack to badgers.

Once they get a taste of them, they will keep going at them again and again and again. High sugar intake for them. So what you can either do is look to buy or make your own modified, lick holders.

So at least 1 metre off the ground, ideally 1.2 metres, that the lick bucket just drops into. This one on the right hand side has a, As a screwed spike on the bottom to hold it into the ground.

Do need to be careful because these things need significant weight in them to stop animals, heifers, bullocks, etc. Pushing them over. Another thing to consider is whether the minerals are actually required, and if they are required, whether a bolus would be a more appropriate way of providing those minerals.

Obviously, badgers can't get to bonuses once they're in cattle. Similarly, water troughs can be modified to stop the risk of badgers coming in and excreting through the sputum into them. Another option is to either empty or move water troughs when they're not in use, or to cover them with a sheet of ply board and a, and a heavy brick on top when that field is not in use.

So other biosecurity measures with the environment, obviously fencing is a key thing, so we need to have solid fencing to stop cattle strain. But, just a little bit about slurry and manure and how we can reduce the risk. Ideally, you'd have slurry stored for as long as possible.

I'm assuming my clients are not unique in the fact that when slurry is going out and being spread, the reality is the top stuff has only been in there less than a day anyway, so, slurry storage is. It is, is just not one of those feasible things at the moment. What we can do though is make sure slurry and manure are spread on fields several months before grazing, or ideally spread onto arable land or silage land.

Solid manure should be thoroughly composted, so we're talking 3 or 4 months before that spread. And then with liquid liquid slurry, we should be looking to use precision techniques. So, umbilicals, injectors, precision, sorry, trailing shoes rather than the, the traditional splash plate.

Two reasons, it puts the slurry closer to the ground, so it's less likely to get ingested, and there's also less aeration of TB which, increases the risk of inhalation and then infection. Also increases your nitrogen usage, so it's it's, it's generally good things to do. Slurry contractors present a risk, because obviously that's slurry coming off other farms.

It's important to make sure if you are using contractors, the equipment is clean, and disinfected as far as feasible. And then also keeping farms as clean and tidy as possible to reduce the risk of, of livestock being exposed to stored manure and slurry whilst it still presents risk. In the bottom right you can see 3.

Three little fact sheets on Slurry, these are available on the website that I'll reference later. But then we come to infrastructure and farm yards, unfortunately badgers aren't particularly good at reading, so it doesn't matter how many signs you put up, they're not gonna deter badgers from coming into your farm yards. It's about putting practical measures in place.

So, two questions. One, are they visiting your farm, and two, what, what should they do about it? Wildlife cameras are the best way of determining if badgers are entering your farm.

These are fairly widely available. They cost anywhere between 80 pounds and 120 pounds. The 80 pounds ones are certainly perfectly adequate for what you need.

Try them in different places, have a bit of a think about where they, they could go, but they are the best way to see if you're being, visited by badgers. Although field signs might show that it's likely. So, if you're seeing paw prints in the, in white soil, if you're seeing areas where fences have been lifted, badger hair on, barbed wire fence, anything like that are indicative that badgers are, are around, .

A reasonable number of farmers have seen badgers, so 43% in a recent survey, but equally cameras picked up, picked up badgers on a further 22% of farms where the farmer had no knowledge that they were there. If they're not there. I think it's fair to assume that there is a potential risk, and that's, that's what we should be looking at.

If there's no, even if there's no clear evidence, let's have a look at the potential risk of badgers coming onto your farm. Where's the, where are the things that attract them? Are there latrines in the local area?

Are there, are there feeding opportunities, and are the buildings accessible? So this is a key figure, really important figure. A badger, an adult badger can squeeze through a gap that's 7.5 centimetres wide, or tall, wide or high.

So about the width of your hand. Obviously these animals are far bigger than that, but they have the ability to squash their bodies down quite small, and that does present, that, that is the magic number that we need to consider. Any gap bigger than 7.5 centimetre is badger excessible.

So we've just got a number of pictures here of measures that have been put in place to present badger visitation, and ultimately, when, when I've gone out and done these visits and, and spoken to farmers and identified the risk, farmers are excellent engineers, and they're also quite ingenious at trying to find ideas and ways, ways to stopping it. We can provide them with the guidelines, but they're the ones that know their farms and, and the activity that goes on their farms, and a lot of these ideas have been, been come up with, with the idea with the help of farmers. So putting solid cheating on gates, is, is a really good one.

Where you have areas where the ground isn't overly level, so, middle left hand side, you need to think about measures, about how you can still get, make that gate functional with a solid side. So the bottom flap there is hinged and lifts up with a, with a little chain there, which just loop loops over a hook. So when that bottom flaps lifts up, the gate can still be opened.

Bottom left, you've got two sheet panels on the gate there. These are on hooks. So again, when you need to open the gate, you just lift those panels up and hook them over a higher bar, and it then allows you to open, open the gate.

Having specified feed bins which close up, electric fencing, putting solid sides down races, and again, bottom right, we've got an area here which would be difficult to shoot without leaving a 7.5 centimetre gap, so the farmer's come up with an idea where he's clad it in steel, sorry, clad it in aluminium, but, with a little corner cut out to allow that to close. Badger exclusion measure measures are 100% effective when properly maintained at keeping badgers out.

So this isn't a case of, of futility, this is actually stuff that works and is in effective. There is no evidence that exclusion measures on one type of facility increase visits to others. So if you shut your door on your feed stall, for example, the obvious one to do, it doesn't mean that all of a sudden they're gonna start going into the cattle housing.

In fact, the opposite's the case. Once you stop them going to the area that they go to most frequently, it's more likely that badgers then stop visiting the farmyard full stop. So again, just a few examples here.

This one in the middle, you've got a bar there that, that sits on some chains that lifts and lowers according to the lie of the ground to take into account the fact that often farm yards are not perfectly level. Bottom in the middle, you've got a little adaptation on the gate here as well to make up for the fact that the ground isn't, isn't exactly flat. Little sections clad to the bottom of doors where the door was breaking down.

And this is an area in around a water trough that's been sealed off as well, so sealing off the, the major route to entrance of, of badges is something that's feasible. But again, we need to be aware of that 7.5 centimetre maximum size.

To allow a badger to get through, for a minimum size route to allow a badger to get through, and a height of 1.2 metres to stop them. So the image on the right is the one I referred to earlier, which is the badger proof fencing.

So this is, this is doable but it is relatively expensive. It needs to be high tensile steel rather than stock fencing. It needs to come up at least 1 metre and then go at least 1 ft underground with a foot coming back on towards the badger side to stop them digging underneath it.

Now if you're doing a large area on that, you can, you can envisage how that it's gonna be pretty costly to put in place. However, once it's put in place, it generally needs relatively low level of maintenance. So here we go, we've got somebody who spent a large amount of money, repairing, trying to badger proof the gate, the fence area, put a lot of mesh over there, and you've got a gap down the side of the gate.

It doesn't look very big, but that badger is quite happily squeezed through that gate between the hitchings and the post. Now, it'd be a relatively easy thing to do something about that strip of rubber down there, a bit of chicken wire down there, will do the job and we'll, we'll put them off. Obviously a bit of chicken wire that's nailed on both sides, it's a bit loose, so the gate can still swing open and it still provides an effective barrier.

So again, 7.5 centimetres is, is the key distance, and these are measures which will stop badgers entering buildings. Top one, we've got a roller door that wasn't hitting the ground properly.

We've got concrete and they've reconcreted that. The roller door's now touching the ground properly and we don't have badgers going in any longer. The bottom one there's a, there's a sheet of gate, but you've still got badgers going in underneath it, and when they're not going in underneath it, they're finding another route into the farm anyway, and then they're, that's going and having a drink from a water trough.

Sheet metal's better than mesh, A, because there's no respiratory secretions go through it, but B, it's, it's in less need of maintenance. Quarry belt is quite useful stuff, so conveyor belt, rubber, quite thick, immovable, but does allow a bit more for, for, uneven surfaces underneath. Again, feed stores, irrelevant of how palatable the feeds are, quite often badgers still visit if there's spilled feed, so tidying up spilled areas, closing them away from, from badgers, appropriate storage is, it's sound biosecurity advice around, around feed storage areas.

The electric fences, badgers are not big fans of electric, and particularly mains electric. 4 strands at 10 centimetres, 1520, 30 can be very effective at excluding badges. This is a maze clamp, an outdoor maze clamp, that badgers are regularly going and feeding and climbing over the earth bank to get their electric fence from round the outside worked really well at keeping the badges away.

Unfortunately it is in an area where, where herbage grows, so what this farmer should have been doing is following the line of that electric fence, either with a strimmer regularly or with some roundup, topically applied to those areas to stop the . Stop the plants growing up against the electric and sorting it out. But again here use of electric around the top of a feeder, so these outdoor feeders on barriers can present a significant challenge to try and keep badgers away.

really good idea, it seemed to work really well. Again, here, if you look on the picture on the top left, sometimes modifying existing structures, and looking at the, holistically at a whole farm, sometimes it's easier to use those existing structures to keep badgers out of farm yards completely, rather than looking at each individual building or potential entrance as a, on its own. So, top left we've got a big area there where badgers can come through, that whole area has been clad in.

In galvanised sheeting and keeping the badges out rather than worrying about specific buildings. So, again, we need to think about. Quite often with biosecurity, the solutions are quite simple, so I only really want to talk about the picture on the bottom right.

This is a feed feed trolley, so build up the cake from the bin and then use to feed groups of young stock. Purely sticking a board on the top when you're not using it and sticking a brick on top of the board will keep the badges away from there, as long as it's tidy and there's no spillages around it. It doesn't need to be high tech.

No, very few of the solutions to that we talk about are high tech or cost large amounts of money. But you need to consider about how they impact on farmers and farmers' lives, if they are significant impediments to the way they carry out their daily routine, they are likely to not be implemented in the right way. So farmers may have to accept the fact that they need to change the way they work and, and, some tasks may take longer.

So this was a, a bit of a, a. Rat run for want of a better term, badger run down into a set of yards that's got blocked off, was originally just sheeted off, but then they found out that they needed to put a gate into it to allow them to pass through. Again, that gate only works if it's closed regularly.

OK. But the issue is that any biosecurity measures we put in place have to be kept up, otherwise they're not gonna be affected. So you've got 3 images here of electric fences, 2 of them, are the two original images, one across a main silage clamp, one a feed barrier.

We've got a load of feed tipped on top of the electric. We've got the silage clamp overfill so it goes over the front of the electric. Neither of these are gonna do anything to stop badges anymore.

Top right you've got somebody spent money sheeting a gate and then driven a tractor in and left a massive rut which your badges wouldn't be able to go through. Rutted floors present considerable risk around buildings, and even if you can get them just putting in a, a 12 metre wide strip of concrete around where the gates would be closed, makes life considerably easier. So where can you guys get more information?

So the, the first port of call that I would always say when it comes to to information around TB is the TV hub. TB Hub is, is kind of government owned but managed and run by various different bodies, and is the main source of information around TB. It's a large number of fact sheets on there around TB, information about current control, etc.

You've also got the IBTV network, IBTV website for, for mapping. Again, I would encourage you to go and have a look at the current situation where you are, have a, have a nosey around individual farmer situation and use it just as a bit of a way of trying to understand better the disease patterns in your area. Is it, are there obvious places where .

Where local risk is considerably higher, can you potentially highlight it, for example, we have, a valley running up to an estuary with a big tree line down the bottom of it, and a couple of years, every farm, a couple of years ago, every farm bordering that was under TB restrictions. Now that to me presents a fairly clear picture of some, some local spread and almost certainly some infected badgers in, in and around that valley that are then spreading at either side. The TV Knowledge Exchange, so the TV Knowledge Exchange is a personal website of Andy Robertson, who Andy works at Woodchester Park in the University of Exeter, would be one of the national experts on, badgers and TB in badgers.

That's his personal managed website as part of his knowledge exchange partnership, . Loads of information there about TB backup of all the fact sheets, more fact sheets. The fact sheets usually go onto the knowledge exchange first before being loaded up to the TB hub.

And from there you'll find a link to his own TB statistics page. So this gives you the ability to compare various TB statistics between counties and within counties between years and have a look at what situation is happening. It's also got some really good information about what's happening with cattle TB outbreaks in the cull areas.

Obviously, as I said, take care with the statistics from the last two years, because there is no control. As yet, that works on going to compare TB incidents in those areas with TB incidents in controlled areas. The TV advisory Service, which I'll come to in a minute, and FCN Farm Community Network, used to be Farm Crisis Network.

It's important to remember that when we're talking about TV, there are some fairly negative impact on mental health, both for the farming profession and the veterinary profession. FCN do a fantastic job. Of supporting those people in need, they can be a good source of information for help people with specific issues, around TB or indeed around any situation regarding farming.

So I think it's well worth having the, having the number available to, to use or to pass on as and when. So very briefly, to last two slides, the TB Advisory Service. So the TB Advisory Service is fully RDP funded, so EU money that is already in the UK so they can't take it back, to provide advice to farmers regarding TB.

It's a 3 year project and we're about 15 months in, and about a third of the way through the delivery targets, to deliver 2400 farm visits and 1900 advice, calls. It is 100% free to farmers. Farmers pay absolutely zero for this service, as long as they are cattle farmers in the higher risk garage area and they have an SBI number, which for anybody who's going through the BVD scheme will know, most farmers have access to their SBI number, it just might be at the bottom of the filing cabinet.

So as part of these visits, farmers get a, they get bespoke advice from trained advisors, which is a mixture of vets and farm consultants. We have set out that there will be no conflict of interest with who is giving that advice. So if there is a trained vet advisor in your area, not working for your practise, and there's a conflict of interest, we would either send a vet advisor from another area or we would send a farm consultant out to one of your clients.

We positively encourage private vets to come and join at the visits. Ultimately, if we all buy into what we're trying to, to, the changes we're trying to put in place, we're more likely to be successful. Unfortunately, the funding wouldn't allow us to put money to pay to private for private vets to come.

We did put it in the original tender, but it, it got turned down by the, by the funding commission. And the intention is to go through effectively what I've described with the farmer, where we look at their TV history, their TB risk factors, prioritise what we believe is important, and then discuss with the farmer what methods they can put in place to reduce the risk. We are generally targeting low cost, easy to implement changes, that will be beneficial not only for TB but for biosecurity to farm overall.

And so far the feedback we had is fantastic from those farmers that have had visits. Those farmers need to be agreed with the sorry, those changes need to be agreed with the farmer. So it's not a case of us telling them what to do, it's a case of, of, of us discussing with them what we think they should do and coming up with a solution together that's likely to be effective, but also likely to be implemented.

We get judged on up on, compliance, and they need to comply with 75% of the recommended interventions. So they need to be achievable and agreed upon. And a visit takes somewhere between 2 and 4 hours, but yeah, they are, they are really useful things to do and they are free to farmers, so anybody in the high risk garage areas, we should be positively encouraging all of our farmers to take advantage of this service.

And that's the end of my talk, so I'd like to thank you all for listening. Thank you very much, Phil. That was a very informative webinar, lots of useful information and resources in there.

If people do have any questions or comments about the talk, now is the time to submit them, or even if you just want to let us know where you're listening in from, that's, it's all very interesting to us. Just as an aside, there is, we do work closely with the, the BCVA, each year to bring some webinars to our community. So if you are a BCVA member and you wish to access those webinars, send an email to office at the webinarvet.com, or you can sign up through the BCVA and you'll be able to access those.

Thank you very much, Phil. We don't seem to have any questions at the moment or comments, but we'll just, give it a minute or two and see what people are saying. Lovely.

I've just realised that the last slide is there, as I say, the whole intention is to change the rhetor around TV. It's to try and change some of the language and empower people to take a bit of control of the disease. Yeah, absolutely.

We have someone listening in from, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. Wow, hitting the international audiences? Absolutely.

Yeah, we have, our community consists of people from 132 countries worldwide. It's impressive. There you are, yes, in, in all kinds of interesting places, someone else from Washington DC.

So OK, we've got a, a good comment here from Sandrash. She says, how motivated are the farmers to eradicate eradicate TB? I'm in Northern Ireland in a TB area and most farmers are very difficult to motivate.

Yeah, so, it's, it's certainly been one of the challenges, and there's a lot of data around there about the fatalism that comes with TB from the, from the farming community. There was a letter in the vet record recently about, a, a failure of uptake of by security advice. What we're finding is that, with the number of changes that are going on at the moment, specifically in, in and around, cus, discussions around cus.

Conversations have already been started, we have a lot of support from the NFU around that. Sometimes you do just hit a brick wall where a farmer cannot see anything that he can do to try and change TV, and that's, that's kind of half of the challenge is just trying to change those opinions and make them feel like what they're doing is useful. Ultimately, how the question, how motivated are farmers to eradicate it, incredibly motivated.

How much do they perceive their actions influence it? We've got a wide spectrum, and the more farmers up that uptake the advice that see positive impacts from it, the more likely we are that, that that will snowball. We've got some really good advocates of, of TB control around the country.

I'm gonna name check James Russell up in Derbyshire, presented at BCVA a couple of years ago on, wildlife proofing its entire farmyard and the knock-on effects that's had on the farmer. So I think we're getting there is the honest answer, but we've still got a lot to, a lot of room to go. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it, it's typical of human behaviour, isn't it? It's very difficult to change people's habits, and people do tend to, or people don't like being told what to do, as you mentioned, it has to be, it has to have buy-in from them as well to, to be successful. Indeed.

Indeed, and, any industry eradication scheme will have seen the same challenges. I'm sure in the early years of BVD eradication from, from Northern Ireland or, or anywhere indeed. There were as many detractors as there were people for it, and you, you kind of need to get to the point where those detractors are the odd ones out rather than the norm.

Yeah, absolutely. I have someone else listening in from Argyllshire in west coast of Scotland, beautiful part of the world, who says, blessedly be BTB free. She's good.

. Sorry, are you envious, yes. Jenny says, excellent presentation, thank you. Sandra says you're lucky that the people you're working with are motivated.

Yeah Brian's asked, was there an oral vaccine for badgers in the pipeline at one point? Yeah, and so I've, I've deliberately tried to avoid the conversations around, around badger culling for a number of reasons. There is an oral vaccination in the pipeline, but it's still probably as far away from being useful and in production as it was when I graduated.

As, as is often the way with these kind of things, ultimately, it was highlighted in the Godfrey report, which was the report to the government that was released in early December, that movement to non-lethal methods of controlling wildlife it has to be the future. The oral vaccination at the moment, the issue, two issues, one is delivery method, and then the other one is consistency of, of intake to ensure that you get, suitable protection. The vaccine in badgers, the injectable vaccine in badgers will reduce progression of disease by about 3/4.

It does nothing for those that are already infected, but it probably does enough that it, it will become part of the control if we can get that oral delivery method right. Yeah, absolutely. That's great information, thank you.

And Sandra said, great talk, thank you very much. Thank you.