Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me on my presentation which will try to give you a taste of sheep dairy production. My name is Y Avalon Gilboa, and I'm a farm vet. I work in the southwest of the UK in the county of Dorset.

It's a farm practise that's called Fris Livestock Health. Myself and a few of my colleagues have a special interest in small ruminant, dairying, and we've set up the dairy, sheep and goat Consultancy Service, so we do see quite a lot of these farms and try to learn as much as we can about them. What I'll try to do today is give you an overview of the industry, talk a little bit about the breeds, the yields, and the products that we see, discuss, fertility and young stock management, touch a bit on milking parlour settings, other health, and data analysis.

And finish off with the treatment options and the drug usage that we can, or the drugs that we can or cannot use, dealing with, diseases, especially a few of the specific production limiting diseases that I will mention later on. I'm sure quite a few of you have dealt or are dealing with commercial sheep, and all I can say about dairy sheep is that they are the same animal, but only slightly different. The main breeds we see globally are the East Friesland and the Lacoon, which originally comes from France.

These are the main breeds we see here in the UK, definitely. And I know it's the same in New Zealand and the US. Having said that, there are a lot of, milk breeds in the world.

In the Mediterranean, you can have the Italian sada, the Greek chios. The Man Manchega sheep in Spain, the Israeli Assaf, which is basically a cross between the traditional Aasi fat tail sheep and the Friesland, that gives a very hardy sheep but with a very high milk production, and the Netherlands and the UK, so. All have their own sort of sheep breeds or compositions.

What we do see a lot in our, flocks is Dorset crosses, and that's for two reasons, basically. A, it gives the lambs that you want to market a better confirmation. They're more meaty.

And also because the Dorsets are easy to breed. All year round, so you can have a lot of out of season breeding without having to resort to hormonal, nutrients and the likes. And recently, we've had the chance of working with a few sort of peculiar breeds, which are not really milk breeds such as the Welsh clin sheep.

And, here and there we see dotted all sorts of flocks where people will milk the local breed. And that gives some sort of a specific special link with the terroir and the flora and fauna of the area and gives it in what the French would call an apeacionorein controlle which is basically a unique selling point. Having said that, it's not very easy to milk, wild reeds, if you like, because these animals have to be handled daily, even when they're not housed in no pasture.

They have to be brought in to be milked twice a day. So they are handled very often and see people, and it's best if when they see you, they don't start jumping off the walls. I'm not going to talk a lot about housing sheep, but just a couple of slides.

If you have a look at the slide in front of you, you can see a group of sheep that are actually struggling to eat. They have to extend their necks, they're on their knees, and it's not the best way for you to eat. You can see that that bar is not really located well.

It should be either lifted or pushed out to allow them better access to feed. And you can see that on the other side, Where I can tell you, you won't see it yourself, that the, bars are arranged in a different kind of way. It's a lot easier to feed, and hence you see a lot more, sheep, basically bunching up that site, which causes a queue, which is not optimal as well.

So making sure that your animals have got the adequate trough space and it's easier for them to feed is very, very important. And when you're dealing with milking animals or commercials, water is really, really important. So water has to be freshly supplied and readily available, not so much like what you see here.

So, water supply, clean, fresh, and changed readily, is really, really important when you're housing cheap. So in the UK when we talk about sheep milk production on the commercial commercial side, we usually link that straight away to lamb growth rates. But in the world, sheep milk is the 4th species of milk consumed globally, as you can see in that picture.

It is the main source of protein in third world and developing countries. There is a long tradition of milking in the Mediterranean basin in European countries with a lot of fantastic products produced, and there is a growing, sorry, there's a growing market worldwide estimated nowadays at about $8 billion US dollars, and that is continuously growing. Here you can see an advert with a very famous Chinese athlete, so I'm told, that is trying to convince the Chinese to drink milk.

That was done back in the 80s and the 90s, so the Chinese market is demanding milk. However, there are some issues with lactose intolerance in Chinese children, so sheep milk is a lot more adapted to it. Some of our colleagues in New Zealand have tapped onto that, and there are a few quite large and very, very efficient dairies in New Zealand that have been set up in recent years to produce milk powder.

In order to go for milk infant formula, and that is an ever-growing market and it's doing really really well. In the UK Sheep, milk, and milk products are a high-end sort of artisan product. It has perceived health benefits, again, easily digested, possibly better for lactose intolerant people, and there is a growing demand there as well.

You can see it mainly in farmers' market, but you can also see it nowadays on the shelves of all the supermarkets. There are about 80 or so members of the British Sheep Dairy Association milking between 20 to 30,000 ewes. The numbers are a bit difficult to come by.

The flocks vary in sizes. You have people milking two animals in the backyard, up to people milking 2000 milking flocks of 2500 animals. And in the north of the country, there is a cooperative milking about 8000 ewes between them, but they're separated and they're milked on a few farms.

But overall, there's a flock, they are 8000 animals strong. Sheep lactation is not very long. This isn't a cow and definitely not the goat that you can carry on milking for 2 years.

Sheep lactation usually lasts only 7 or 8 months. Some tapered breeds like the AAF can do 9 months or 10 at the most, but that's at the push, and the yields would be up to 700 or maybe 900 litres, but usually if you're making 2000 to 400 litres per sheep plantation, you're quite happy, especially if you're doing that on grass. If you look at milk composition, that's the sheep milk, and the striking thing is that Solids are really, really high, which really lend itself to sheep production or milk powder production.

If we have mentioned lactose, it's not as if sheep sheep milk does not have lactose. It actually has more lactose than goat and cow's milk, but it's in a different is on there in a different way that can be digested potentially more easily. What products are being made?

Well, in the UK and I believe globally, between 75 to 90% of the milk is turned into cheese, and fantastic cheeses indeed. The French hot for, the pecorino, which is made in Sardinia. So pecorin asada or, in Italy, Manchego cheese in Spain and the famous Greek feta.

But a lot of other products are made as well, yoghurt and milk, and as we mentioned, milk powder is an ever growing, Sort of baseline product that can be used. Energy drinks as well, cosmetics, you can do a lot with sheep milk. If you're a farmer producing milk for human consumption, and you're working with the dairy, you'll probably get anywhere between 115 to 135p per litre, and your cost of production, depending on your efficiency and your intensiveness or extensiveness would be between 80 to 50 PBO cost of production.

In New Zealand, I believe you will get $60 New Zealand dollars for a kilo of, you know, solids, which would translate to about 5 litres, which would mean 168 pence per litre. So farmers can smile about the return they get from sheep milk. If you're at the farm gate, if you're selling your products yourself, you can sell a bottle of milk, 500 millilitres for 1 pound 99.

You can charge £5 for 0.5 kg of, a tub of ice cream, and you can produce 22 yoghurt pots 1 litre and produce. And, and sell each for 1 pound 33.

The same pot of yoghurt will be sold for almost double that in the supermarkets. And cheeses can be, have a starting point of 25 pounds per kilo, and it can go ad infinitum, depending on your, The level of expertise, your marketing, you can charge quite a lot or you can get a really, really good return on cheat sheets. So, in order to make the cheese, you have to milk the animals, and in order to milk them, you need to manage them for fertility, so, they give you milk.

There are many production systems practised. Some people would only milk their sheep once a year, or they'll have one milking group, which will be quite seasonal, and other farms would have 6 different groups lambing at different times of the year, producing milk all year round. Well, it's no surprise that the processors are quite keen on all year round milk production, and they would sometimes give an out of season milk bonus, which some people are very keen to go for, but it means that you have to potentially Make the animals breed at least annually, and sheep can be bred while they milk to lamb annually, but it's not uncommon definitely in Israel for animals to lamb 3 times in 2 years.

In Canada, you have farms that would milk, or sorry, with lamb to milk 5 times in 4 years, so animals can milk, not just, or can lamb more than once. Once a year. So out of season breeding is very common and so is synchronisation in order to get a compact lambing season, which would make your workload and production management a lot slicker.

So, how do we synchronise them and cause them to breed out of season. The two main things that people use, especially if they're organic, are the ram effect and teaser RAMs. The Ram effect means that basically you hide the boys away from sight, sound, and smell for about 4 weeks minimum before you introduce them, and then you introduce them together and Everybody's really happy to see each other, and most of the news with ovulate within 6 days.

Some of that would be silent heats, but then within a short period after, most of them will be mated. And if you put rattles on the rams, you can see how well they've worked and all the sheep are coloured very quickly. The other thing you can do is you can use teaser RAMs, so you can keep the, rams away from sight sound and smell, and you could introduce some teaser rams who've had the operation to remove the plumbing.

So basically, they can do the deed, but they would not deliver semen. You use 2 to 3 teasers for 100 years, and you keep them with the animals for 2 weeks. And then you replace them with the intact rams at a ratio of 1 to 20, and most of the animals will be served by about 18 to 25 days after the teaser introduction.

We have organic farms who are breeding groups of ewes out of season, and they regularly will send. 450 used to be teasered and then tapped, and they would get 350 lamb, 350 animals in in lamb, which means 77% success rate, and that's out of season. So that's pretty good without using any hormones, any hormones.

So you can use all sorts of hormones to help you, melatonin implants. Plus or minus light manipulation, you want to introduce those about 35 days prior to the mating season, mating date, and just bear in mind that the rams have to be done a week earlier and they have to be given 2 or 3 implants to increase their libido and semen production. Recently in the UK, we had some availability problems, something to do with the minimum residue level of the product, and I'm hoping that would be resolved fairly soon.

Progesterone implants, either chronic sponges or cedar ovis that you can see here, can be used. They are introduced into the vagina in a clean and careful and safe way and are left there for 12 to 14 days. If you're out of season, then when you remove the implant, you give them an ECG or a PMSG injection between 200 to 500 international units, and that makes sure that they're all be ready.

Very soon afterwards to be mated. You introduce the RAMs, and you want to make sure that you're using RAMs which can make, which can mate, annually. So all year round, like the Dorsets, and you would do that at the low round to U ratio, something between 1 to 5 or 1 to 20, because it will be quite a batched season.

The other thing you wanna do is you want to give the RAs a fitness examination and MOT to make sure they are ready for the task. And this is perceived to be the best way to do artificial examination and out of season. So, on to deal with the lambs.

The lambs, because we're interested in the milk for human consumption, the lambs are reared artificially, and they need to be separated from the dams fairly early. Many different practises, again, the, I think the beauty of sheep production is that there's no one way of doing things, and there's a lot of different miraculous, wonderful ways, and you learn a lot when you deal with sheep, with milking sheep and the farms. So the lambs can be either snatched at birth and being fed colostrum, as you can see this lady doing here, or they can be left with the ewe for up to 60 days, as they commonly do in the rockfall region.

And, the cheese is produced alongside the lamb's actually sucking. There is an issue with, dairy breed of lambs because they're quite sinly and quite dly little things, and the confirmation is not very good, and they're not really well looked or well sought after by the local butchers. So what we recommend to our, breeders would be to, to breed the top 25 or 30% that they use to dairy breed rams.

And then breed the rest of them to meat breeds to have a better lamb confirmation so they can sell more easily. But that means you require data and you need to know which of the uses are doing well and which are not. When you're rearing lambs, care, cleanliness, and consistency has to be practised.

Everything has to be clean and, consistent. And you can do a bit of praying as well. Or, what we're actually doing here is making sure that the air at the lab level is suitable for breathing, and it is here because you can see how nice and clean and freshly bedded this pen is.

But that is an exercise we do with our farmers quite often, not because we're mean, but because we want them to understand that standing above the lambs in the pen doesn't really give you an idea of what they're actually breathing and the risk of pneumonia that can be, . As a result of that. These are a series of pictures I took in a recent visit to the Netherlands where I was quite impressed by the lamb rearing unit.

First of all, because you can see it, there's a physical barrier which you're only crossing if you've got shoe covers. The owner is snatching all the lambs at birth, and he's reaming them for a few days in individual clean, fresh cardboard boxes. He's doing that because he's trying to get rid of Yoni's disease, which we'll deal with a bit later, and After a week or so, he batches the lambs together.

You can see how nice and clean and how happy the lambs are. He allows them initially 4, but then 2 teats for 10 animals, and he protects the teats with a a wooden bar with some holes in it. He says that it makes sure that there's no teeth biting and the animals are not fighting each other when they're about to, when they're going to drink.

You can see that there's still a bit of a, an accumulation of lambs, and usually when one lamb goes to drink, the others will follow, but he says it makes them calmer and it's easier for him to maintain the tes. And of course, from day one, he produces both forage and some lamb nuts because those would help with ruin. On to talk about milky parlours.

Again, we see a lot of weird and wonderful homemade operations like this one here, in the Flinn Peninsula, and these are the famous, clean milking sheep, but you can also get, A top end partner available with all the bells and whistles, and you can see me here wondering which button I should press to do what because these can be quite sophisticated, or maybe I'm just too simple for those. The parlour settings, the pulsation rate is 120 to 180 BPM, which is 2 to 3 times quicker than any cow dairy pulsation rate. And these are one of this, that's one of the things that you notice straight away when you go into a sheep milking parlour.

The pulsation is, is very, very rapid. The background. Usually, we would say use 120 if you're using rubber liners and a pneumatic pulsator, and you can move up to 180 if you're using silicone liners and automatic electronic pulsators, and the pulsation ratio is 50/50.

The vacuum at the claw piece is 28 to 39, so slightly lower than cows because the teat structure is slightly different. And again, you have here the vacuum for low and high lines as well. Milking up times for sheep is between 1 to 2 minutes.

So much quicker than a cow, but sheep can hide about 20% of their milk as residual milk, and hence farmers would resort to bumping the other in order to release to have that second release. Or you have to, if you're using ACR, automatic cluster removals, you have to set them appropriately to accommodate for that 20% residual milk. And if you're doing it, .

By hand, then you need to avoid over milking, and you have to shut the vacuum as this person is doing, pressing that clip here before you manually remove, otherwise you'll make some teat and damage. As with every parlour of every species, you have to, milk hygienically. We recommend our farmers wear gloves, which are easy to disinfect and wash in between lines, but clean hands are.

Perhaps not as OK, but our second best. You can see this person here having a glove on one hand and a bare hand on the other, not sure why, but that was part of the reason I took that photo and for the fact that he was sort of pressing on the . Sort of valve here to shut the vacuum.

These again, a series of photos I took in Canada. This is Chris Bushbank, who is actually a vet herself and she milks a group of recent ewes at home. The youths have just come.

Back from the pasture, and you can see the pasture is well drained and dry because the animals are nice and clean, they're not mucky at all. She dry wipes them with an alcohol wipe, then she checks the milk for any clots to make sure that they haven't got mastitis. Then they go on to be milked and at the end, she does a post dip.

With povertyidine to prevent any of the chronic contagious bugs migrating into the other. If we're talking about levels of mastitis, then we see low levels of clinical mastitis. Which is great.

Nutrition is key for both yield and for immunity. And the good thing about milking sheep is that there's no two hungry lambs biting on the teeth and causing damage. But the other has to contend with milk milk.

Hands, hence they have to be nice and clean. And the milking machine, which again has to be maintained well, the liners have to be changed, and the vacuum has to be looked after and the ACR, sort of adjusted, so we're not causing any teeth and damage. What we do see a lot is the subclinical mastitis, which is basically only detected if you're looking for it, but we do see cases of clinical, sorry, subclinical chronic cases, which brings upon low yields and low solids, and solids is what we're looking for.

And because in masittic milk you'll have all sorts of inflammatory mediators, it brings on what we call low cheeseability, so the cheese doesn't form very well. Most of the bugs we see are contagious stuffs and streps, and how you find these things is when you look for them, usually by using somatic cell counts, because the count on these subclinical ones, which, as the name implies, do not show you any signs, is, that you, you can spot them because they all have high somatic cell counts. This is a group of 30 Us we were looking at during an lactation.

In blue, you can see the level of solids for each individual U. And in red, I'm not sure why we have a line here, but the dots, look at the dots in red is the level of somatic cell count, and you can see that the majority of the ewes with a high cell count are producing less solids, which is, is fairly understandable, but this is a nice visual we think. What are those somatic cell counts, just to recap.

The cells found in milk, 5% of them are lining cells, but the rest are the white blood cells of the immune system, and they're the first line of defence of the immune system. And when you have an inflammation, then you have a rise in these cells and a neutrophil surge. So the polymorphic nuclei are are represented much in much higher numbers.

So if you have a subclinical. Mastitis, you will have a higher level of cell cancer. Now, just a reminder that the milk production in sheep is by apocrine milk production, not neocrine like cattle.

So meocrine is when just the milk globules are leaving the milk producing cells, but in sheep, actually the, the end of the cell is being pinched, and then what it gives you, it gives you a higher somatic cell count reading. Having said that, Cell counts are still an excellent indicator of mastitis. We believe that fro level should be below 500,000 cells per millilitre, and if you see an individual with over 400,000, then there is another health issue there with that individual, and we have quite a few flocks who are milking well below 2000, 200,000 of these.

Again, it depends on the stage of lactation and parity of age, so the older the U is and if she's well into her lactation, usually the cell can creep up a bit. This is another, table that can show you. That's the somatic cell counts, and in sheep here on the left, goats on the right.

Healthy other up until 200, 300, and from 400 onwards, we are looking at some level of mastitis, usually subclinical. If we talk quickly about milk quality, then some countries present a legal limit on certain milk parameters, and we'll give you a price incentive for things like somatic cell counts. In the UK, for instance, we don't have any legal limits, but the processes have their own guidelines.

If you look, for example, on the BSDA guidelines. These are one of the advantages of Zoom that you can get close to the screen. You can see these are the BSDA targets for bugs and, butter fat and protein, and also for somatic cell counts, which we're looking at less than 500,000.

Surprisingly, the European Community and the specialised cheese Association are not looking to limit the level of somatic cell counts, but BSDA targets are definitely looking at under 500,000. This is a table taken from the somatic cell count milk scheme, sheep milk scheme in the Israeli board, and you can see starting in 2016 and tightening till 2018, they are given a Price difference for the level of cell counts that you have. So your target price will be given to you if you're producing milk with only 500 to 600, cell counts per mL.

And, if you go under. That you get a bonus, and if you go over 600,000, you get a penalty which is paid into a levy. And if your quarterly average is above 1,500,000, then your milk is rejected and not taken away, which is quite a blow.

This is the age of technology. Each and every one of us probably has an iPhone or another, sorry, another, mobile phone, which, has a processor in it which is stronger than the one that landed Apollo 11 on the moon. So technology is there for us to use, and the UK has actually announced a new initiative for precision livestock farming, so to base quite a lot of the farming practises on advanced technology.

We are looking for sustainable production. But in a way, simple milk metres on some of the parlours would see would be a good start, but other parlours can have a really well integrated farm managing system that would allow you to get where you need to go in a sustainable way and cut your losses and be more efficient. As you know, these are readily available, fairly cheap to have, .

Electronic identification devices which would identify individual use and collect quite a lot of information. You can now scan your use using a portable Bluetooth scanner. All the information, as we said, is onto your mobile phone nowadays and linked together to a computer.

And this is Sarah, one of our, shepherdesses in one of the flocks. You can see above her head is 6 different groups because that is the, Flock that is landing 6 different groups in a year, and they have cameras in the parlour to make sure that everything works well. You can see the VAT, the vet's van, so I'm quiet that my van is well looked after, but a lot of technology, cameras and a lot of data recording is happening to make sure that production is efficient.

Farm management system, as we said, they collect individual and group data, and they are looking at parlour performance for identification of all the animals and the milking parameters, and they give you a fantastic tool, as I said, for performance monitoring and making decisions for breeding, who's going to be bred, who's gonna be culled, if she's bred, is she going to be bred to a, a milk breed lamb because she's doing really well, or can we breed her to a dorset for lamb confirmation? And we believe that the dairy sheep and goat Consultancy group that adoption of technology is key for sustainability, even in smaller flocks. This is part of what Dela Val Delpro sheep and goat software is recording, and you can see quite a lot of parameters are being gathered from feeding records and cunning decisions can be made, drug records and daily milk recordings, what the parlour is doing, all these things are recorded and integrated to allow you to make good decisions.

This is what the parlour has been doing on that day, that's morning milking in blue. Afternoon milking in green, you can see the milk yield in either of these groups, you can see how many milk was produced in an hour, how many sheep. Were milked in an hour, the average yield for you and the total milk, a lot of information is gathered.

This is a view of an animal that's about to get some medication, so that's an individual file. That's the animal, that's her number. She's 2 years and 8 months of age, had two lactations.

Her average yield is 0.75. She's already bred and she's still milking.

You can see all her history, any treatments that she had, groups that she's changed, and here, the drug that she's about to get, including the meat with whole days and the milk with whole days. And how frequent that drug can be given and the application method is subcut in this incident, so a lot of information is gathered to allow you to make the right decisions. Speaking of drugs, Drugs and treatment options.

Basically, it's quite limited. There's limited availability of drugs and vaccines for milking sheep. Some of the drugs are not at all licenced for sheep in the UK.

Unfortunately, Metaam, which is a very, very important non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, is one of them, and some of them. Are not authorised for sheep producing milk for human consumption, like betamox and all the other amoxicinins, which I, I've chosen beamox which is that's quite a common drug to be used in commercial sheep production. Metaan, however, is licenced for sheep in the in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, but you're not allowed to use it during lactation or 11 days before lactation starts, so quite restricting.

Vets should observe the cascade when prescribing, which would allow us to use drugs that are potentially not licenced, and unless they're forbidden, you can use them but apply a 7 day milk withhold. But farms should try and do their best to rely on good management and disease prevention for a sustainable future. So try to avoid or try to make your farmers and help your farmers avoid buying in diseases when they do buy in animals.

You want them to be quarantined for a set period of time and observed, and you want to vaccinate them if you can. The housing is to be clean and dry and well ventilated. Pasture tracks and gateways have to be managed properly so they're not full of mud and muck.

Stocking rates both inside the sheds and on pasture has to be managed carefully. And as I've mentioned in my one of my first slides, feed and water trough space and availability are quite important. These are two drugs that are commonly used against commercial sheep production.

I'm happy to say that haptava Plus, which is the vaccination we use for clostridial diseases, is very, is allowed to be used with no milk withhold in dairy sheep. It doesn't really matter because we usually give it in a dry period, 4 to 6 weeks before they land to boost the immunity. So, but it's nice to have something that you can give to, milking sheep.

And enamycin, and most of the oxytetracycline injectables will set you back 7 days in milk with, which is something to consider. I'm moving on to talk about production limiting diseases. So the diseases we see more commonly, which have a huge impact on production.

The first one is lameness, and it's no surprise because sheep farmers would tell you love to go lame. Internal and external parasites, and then all the classic iceberg diseases, those hidden diseases that we see, and of which we won't have time to speak about all of them, but we'll talk predominantly about Jones disease. So lameness, lameness is one of the main disease conditions of many dairy sheep farms and commercial farms.

They have wet conditions on pasture, high stocking density when housed. And you get name sheet. In the UK we have a 5 point plan to allow farms to tackle lameness, so let's try and see what's applicable to dairy sheep.

Can't repeat cases in order for them not to be a focus for reinfection and you can definitely do that. You can quarantine incoming stock to make sure you don't buy in any virulent footro, any CODD contagious ovar digital dermatitis. So that's definitely what we recommend.

And you want to avoid infection and spread again through gateways and tracks, sheds, facilities, and if you have lane uses, you want to gather them together in the dump group and make sure they don't just roam the rest of the, sheds or the pastures. Vaccinate is one of the key components of the five-point plan, and foot vax is available when we're dealing with footrot. Having said that, foot vax is not allowed to be used in lactating dairy, dairy sheep.

It can be used during the dry period, because they're not lactating at that time, but then the dry period falls a lot of the times, at the wrong time. So, Not easy to utilise foot facts when you really need it because we see foot rot in times where the animals are in peak production in spring and summer, so. Treating cases early or treating case properly and early is the 5 pillar, the 5th pillar, and Again, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are indicated.

They're not licenced in sheep in the UK, but actually we can use MetaCam, and we need to apply a 7 day milk withhold. In a way, our condition and situation is better than New Zealand and Canada because in the UK we can use it under the cascade, only we need to apply 7 day milk withhold, whereas over there they're not allowed to be used during plantation. Antibiotics, or the oxy tetracycline, which are indicated predominantly for foot rot, can be used, but have a 7 day milk withhold.

And oxy tetracycline spray has got a zero milk withhold. So if you catch the animals early when they're only at the scold stage of the disease, that would, not set you back at all. So, early detection of lameness and prompt treatment would pay dividends here.

Parasites, we're worried about all of them basically. Nematodes, so strongiles and Aunchus, which we see quite a lot, trematodes, liver fluke, lice. Flies for fly strike and the dreaded scab mite, all of them causing huge production and welfare concerns.

For instance, this is a liver of an animal that had died of liver fluke. You can see it doesn't really look like liver. We've lost two foetuses.

You can see one of them here. So tremendous effect or negative effect on production and that animal's welfare, for sure. And again, the other thing is, is that treating those animals, there are well established resistant issues, resistance issues in quite a few of those nasties.

What can we use in milking sheep? If you look at the white drenches, which we use for worms, or the trilobendazole, which we use for the young forms of Fluke, then panicure we can use with a 7 day milk with hold, and the rest are not to be used for sheep producing milk for human consumption. Try clobendazole, don't use it for use producing milk, including the dry period and 1 year prior to first time.

So basically, put a sticker on the bottle and say, don't even think about it. Now, all these parasites, when you use them, you have to use them on the whole group, not so much the individual animals, which means that if you give them panicure. You need to observe a 7 day milk withhold for all of them, which is no milkshake.

If you are looking at the yellow drenches, again, not to be used for sheep using, producing milk for human consumption, same for fluivar, the Levicul, closamectin, Trodax again, don't even think about it. The only drug we can use here in the UK for fluke, although it's not effective for immature fluke, is Xanil, which again will carry a seven day milk. If we're looking at the clear drenches, against the again, the majority of them apart from yin drench are not to be used for dairy sheep at any stage of their life, or definitely not when you're, when you're milk producing.

Sydectin drench can be used 5 day milk withhold. When you're looking at sheep scab, which sidedectin 12% is one of the better treatments for, and another one is an organophosphate dip, both of these are not allowed to be used in sheep producing milk. So again, treatment for sheep scab are not, readily available.

There is one product called Eronix Multi, which is a poon, which has 0 days, no milk withal, which is wonderful, and it is licenced for sheep and goats here in the UK and in other places in the world. The issue is that porn is not really optimal for internal parasites and not really optimal for scam. Having said that, it is licenced and I've spoken to quite a few colleagues in Spain and Greece who have been using it quite successfully, so I'm definitely not knocking it.

But when you use it, you don't just put it on the fleece like you would some of the fly treatments, but you have to apply it with a specific nozzle onto the skin. Epreys 2% is an injectable for cattle with 00 megal in cattle, and I believe the company is hoping to licence that, for use of milking sheep and milking goats. At the moment, if you do want to use it, you have to use it under the cascade, although that's difficult to justify because you have got a licenced product for it.

The 4th and 5th generation of wormers, the Zorviks and the Startected, are not to be used in sheep producing milk for human consumption, which creates a bit of a problem with our quarantine trenches, so it's something to consider. If we're looking at the spot-ons for lice, for instance, the deltamethrine spot on Spotti or are not, is not allowed to use, but deltonil is with 0 days, so a bit of an oddity. And if you're looking to prevent flies with insect growth regulators such as click, you won't be able to milk the sheep, or you can milk them, but you're not allowed to market the milk for 7 days.

So, You can see it's a bit of a minefield. You have to know your drugs, and you have to look for the right drugs at the right times, but basically, if you can, try to avoid disease. Which brings me to talk about the last of the diseases I want to mention, which is Yoni's disease.

Yoni's is perceived as the highest risk for the national flock productivity and sustainability in the UK. In a recent survey, about 64% of faecal samples from commercial lowland flocks were PCR positives, and observing those flocks over three years, we've seen a much reduced life expectancy of use, with only 17% of them versus 40% remaining in the herd over 3 years, so quite a substantial early exit. This is some government data about all the diagnosis of iceberg diseases, and you can see that in pink, or orange, Yonni's disease is the highest.

In, most years. Just a reminder Jone's disease or tuberculosis, identified in 1895 by Heinrich Johanne, who is a German physician caused by mycobacterium IV para tuberculosis, and as we're such good friends, we call it ma. It's present worldwide and affects ruminants, and the main route of transmission is faecal aura.

Most infections would happen in very young animals between 0 to 6 months of age, and what comes after that is a slow progressive thickening of the ileum until it looks like that, very thick, very corrugated, so. You get malabsorption and protein losing and neuropathy. The animals will eat at the initial stages, or even at later stages before they crumble, but they won't absorb much.

So you get wasting disease and immune suppression. This is how the disease will look at later stages in cattle. They will always scour profusely.

The problem with sheep is that they might look thin, but they don't always scour, so a bit more difficult to detect. Sheep are unlucky enough to be infected by both the sheep and the cattle strain, and when they get the disease, they can either, some of them might miraculously clear it and be asymptomatic, and the rest would go on to develop one of two forms of the disease, the multibacillary or the foci bacillary, which are different in the way the, the immune, system is going, and the oy bacillary will have a lot less antibody production. You have late intermittent bacterial shedding, you have some breeds who are more susceptible to the disease than other, and there are quite a lot of issues with test specificity and sensitivity, which makes it very difficult to control the disease.

Animals would be 2+ years and they start wasting away. We see production losses even before that, due to lameness, mastitis, and fertility because of low immunity and, of course, lower milk production, which is something we're interested in. You have increased culling rate, as we've said before, but it's often Attributed to other conditions and not necessarily to yonis because they grow lame or they don't conceive or they get mastitis, and they exit for various reasons, which is for poor body weight.

On average, if you look at studies, they're looking at gross margin loss of 8.5%, which is quite a high loss. And the The thing that we all need to consider is that MA is linked to Crohn's disease, and in a university of Hiros Hiroshima, if I'm not mistaken, they found that even mA particles or muck antigens can induce gut pathology.

So not only viable bugs, but also bug particles. So when we're feeding clients with natural sheep yoghurt, or now that we're all MasterChef winners and we all sort of dish our lamb pink. It's not something we need to think about.

Also, some studies have shown that map was found in powdered infant formula. Quite a few of the samples were PCR positive. There's a bit of a debate whether you could actually culture any viable bugs from it, but definitely you could culture bugs from retail milk in the UK and in other countries.

So milk that was bought on the shelf and cultured, viable bugs were there, so pasteurisation is not 100% effective. That brought the dairy cows, dairy cattle people, to come up with a national Yoni's management plan. The plan was started, started in 2016, and farmers had to declare their herd status by a minimum of 30 cows screen.

And if any animals were found positive, the whole herd was tested between 2 to 4 times a year ever since. They had to liaise with the Action Yoni's delivery vet. And they had to decide and sign a plan of action by October 31st, 2016, and annually since then, and we as vets with our farms have to show annual improvement.

And at the moment, some of the Supermarkets and milk buyers would insist that any positive cow would exit the herd, the cow herd within 60 days. So, is yonies a concern to milking flus? We believe it is, it is quite a big concern.

First of all, you have production losses, and in this day and age, we're all talking about sustainability and better, more efficient production. It is a huge animal welfare concern because the animals are sick, and we have the issue of product safety. So public perception and consumer trust can be dented quite badly if they sort of start thinking or if they're aware of yonis in sheep milk.

And just bear in mind that we are, people are choosing to use sheep products as a healthier option. So if we don't make it a healthier product, more so than the cows, we're basically committing, some sort of a sin. This is a clip that was taken from Waitrose Facebook page, a member of the public, Lisa George, asking if the cows are from Yoni's free herds.

So it's here to show you that basically the public knows about the disease, some more than others, and we definitely have to take notice of it and make sure that the product is safe to use. The good news is that we have a vaccine. We have a vaccine for sheep and goats.

It's an activated map strain, it's a 1 mil single injection dose at early stages of life between 4 to 16 weeks, and it's been found to reduce shedding and clinical disease by up to 90%, which is pretty good. It costs about in the UK about 3 pounds excluding VAT per dose. So I'm not saying you should vaccinate 600 uses.

All in one go, but you can definitely, vaccinate your replacements annually, and within 3 to 4 to 5 years, the herd will be, protected. It is cost benefit if you have a mortality rate over 1%. That was found in a New Zealand study in 2018.

So if you have more than 1% mortality due to Jo Jones' disease or Yoni, then making that investment is, is a good thing to do. One thing to bear in mind is that it's potentially interfering with Yoni's serology testing and the skin test, if you're unlucky enough that your sheep have to go through one of these. The not so good news is that the diagnostic tests, or the serologies and the PCRs which you can do pool samples.

Have got issues with a cost, intermittent and late shedding inhibitors for PCR and the oy bacillary stage, which again have got very little antibody production. And if you vaccinate the animals, then, results have to be interpreted with caution. Postmortem examination is quite an important one, especially if you open the animal and immediately see this sort of corrugated, thickened yellowy, piece of gut.

You know, you've got yoni in front of you, but you should definitely send for histology. Faecal culture is basically the . Gold standard, but it is gold standard because it's quite expensive and it does take about take about 16 weeks to get results.

There are a few new tests that are being checked and I think that during the webinar vets, conference that we are part of. There is a presentation that I'm really keen to hear about a new QPCR test forgers disease in milk. So there are new tests coming that would hopefully increase the sens sensitivity, specificity, and we look for the bugs and not necessarily the immune response, which would allow us to vaccinate our flocks and still test for gurneys.

Do we need a control strategy? Yes, I think we do, and my colleagues at the consultancy service think we do. We need to ask our farmers to cull any suspect or any tested animals quite aggressively.

You want to vaccinate your replacement new lambs, and you want to group your suspect and then use the lambs separately and not retain any of these lambs for breeding. Abattoir and falling stock surveillance would be good, and perhaps we need a national monitoring and control scheme like the cows do. I always believe that if the sector itself, farmers and vets and the BSDA would come up with a plan, it would be better than any plan that would be forced upon us by the supermarkets, which have a slightly different agenda to the producers.

So, coming up with a robust scientific plan. Vet led would be quite a good thing before one is forced upon us. Because the cattle National Joies .

Management plan will impact milking sheep, as will consumer perception and consumer trust issues. So just my final slide is to say that the sheep milking sector. Is enjoying a continual global growth with some fantastic products.

This is a fantastic Rockfield cheese produced by my friends at Velvet Cloud in Northern Ireland. Continuous global growth. As vets, we're dealing with open-minded producers who have got a thirst for knowledge and are thinking outside the box, which is great to be around these people.

And the production systems are a lot more suited than cows for soil health and sustainability, so the future is basically quite bright. I want to thank you for listening to this, to this presentation, and I'd like to welcome you to our webpage, the DairySheep and goat.com, where you can find information about us and the Dairy sheep and goat conference, which is an annual event till the pandemic hit.

So there's no, conference running this year, but hopefully the next. And please feel free to note down my, email address and I'll be very happy to share all the information that I have with, anyone that's interested. Thank you very much.