I wanted to start, if I may, this evening with some of what I hope we can take away from tonight. And, those of you who met me before and me speak before will know that this is something I like to do so that, you know that you have the opportunity to, you know, to think about how those ages webinar, but also, if you don't want to listen to anything else, then you've got what we wanted from the first slide. Really my key message tonight that I hope we can take away is that biosecurity is more than a clean pair of wellies and it Probably led by vets more than we may care to think.

And what I mean by that is that we need to lead by example when it comes to biosecurity. Too many times I fear that we fall short of that, high, high standard that we should be out for ourselves. And we need to consider how that knocks on into farmer behaviour.

I think biosecurity is something which is very poorly understood by a great number of farmers, and we'll explore this as we go through the idea that biosecurity is something which is done unto farmers, often against their will, and they can't really see the, the benefit. There are obviously exceptions to that. And, and this is a kind of common theme with a lot of these considerations I have is that we have more and more knowledgeable people, coming through as paraprofessions with, on farms.

And if we don't make sure that we're getting our message across in this aspect of, our management, then others will, and they won't come at it with the benefit of a veterinary degree and the understanding that goes alongside that. I think this is really quite important for us. Couple of learning objectives, and please, you know, if you look a little different.

James, sorry, can I just interrupt? The sound quality's gone really bad. Poor this end.

I'm not sure whether it is, myself or whether it's coming from your end. I don't know whether anyone else have any issues with sound, but it might just be worth you dialling in if that's all right. Yeah, I will do that right now.

Bear with me. So do you want me to, because the, the poll question, should I start the poll question, just to give you time to dial in. Does that sound OK?

That sounds ideal. Thank you. Fantastic.

So, only one slide early, but we'll do it now. I'll launch this first poll question. And the first poll question is, what would happen if you build a meeting as biosecurity for farmers?

So what would happen if you build a meeting as biosecurity for farmers? Would it, A, the room would be bursting at the seams. B, there would be a sudden interest in disease control sparked by the idea of the meeting.

C, people would need to be free for silaging even though it is December, or D, the letter would never get opened. So as I say, you know, No right or wrong answer to this one. I think it's a bit of a fun question really, just to get your perception on what you think, the interest is around biosecurity and er how excited people get about it.

So, is, are you back on there, James? I am back here Rich yeah doing that. No worries, that's a lot better.

Right, I think we've got the majority of people to vote, so I'll end that now. So, oh, James, bad news. No one said that the room would be bursting at the seams.

And I'm sure you thought that 100% it'd be saying the room would be bursting at the seams, didn't you? Hoping for. But 29% have said there'll be a sudden interest in disease control.

57%, which is the majority have said people would need to be free for siloing even though it was December, and 14% have said the letter would never get opened. OK, thank you for that and . Let's just, let's just move on and start to think about that.

Sorry, I just wanted to make sure my slides caught up there. So yeah, I mean, I said I was hoping obviously that the room would be bursting at the seams, and, but I was being a little facetious. I recognise that probably biosecurity, is considered to be a very dry topic.

What I am, very pleased to see though is that we do a number of us are saying that there would be an increase in interest in matters surrounding disease control. So hopefully those messages that biosecurity is part of that are getting through. But yeah, you know, we've got over 2/3 of people either going siloing in December or or not opening the letter.

So, you know, I think that this quote from even more just kind of covered that off quite nicely, really, didn't it? We, we've got this concern here that we're going to be spoken to about something which is not going to engage us and is not going to excite us. And this is what I envisaged would happen, you know, if I, if I was to build that to my clients, whether we've got Mr.

Bean here with, you know, holding, holding his eyes open or, yeah, no, that's very interesting, please do go on, and I said. That that would, I would talk a little bit about biosecurity being done onto farmers and the feeling that they were under the cosh really with biosecurity. And I'd like to recount, possibly the most depressing comment I ever heard, with regards to biosecurity on farm, which would have been, 2008 when the first bluetongue outbreak, came into the country.

And I turned upon a farm and the farmer was in a really bad mood, because he just had to put the straw mats out again at the farm gate. And you know, he said, I've only just finished packing those away from foot and mouth, and now they're making me do it again. And I thought that showed a couple of things really.

I think firstly, it showed the attitude that that person had at that time to the whole idea of protecting his his herd. But also it showed a complete lack of understanding of what was going to be good for biosecurity. Bluetongue being a disease which is spread by, you know, an insect vector, was unlikely to be stopped from coming onto that farm by him disinfecting straw at the farm gate.

More recently, I think we've all seen how hard it's been to get people to take seriously biosecurity during the recent avian influenza outbreaks, and I'm not talking here about those major chicken producers. A kind of recurrent theme this evening will be my assertion that the white meat sector has got an awful lot that it could teach the red meat sector about how seriously we should take biosecurity. And, so I'm not talking about those guys.

What I'm talking about are the, you know, the farmers who have 20-30 birds scratching around the farm, laying a few eggs, whatever, and. I saw so few of those become housed during the period where that was obligatory that, you know, it did prompt me to start asking some questions. And we came back with answers that, well, yeah, but it's too hard.

It's not going to make any difference, you know, have you seen all the pigeons flying around? Why would, why would my birds be being shut up make any difference at all? I'm not going to do that because my neighbour doesn't do it, so, you know, it's all, it's all a waste of time.

And You know, that I think really reinforced for me the lack of faith that was being shown by those people that small incremental improvements in whole farm biosecurity could lead to a reduction in the disease pressure more generally. I've already mentioned the the white meat sector, and the person I think about most in that situation is a farmer who I'm going to mention a couple of times during this presentation, who his primary role in life is as a poultry farmer. He produces hundreds of thousands of birds for Tesco's.

His, his wife was on the front of the packets of chicken at in Tesco's for a while, you know, they're in a big way with their, with their poultry. But his real interest is in, is in farming goats. And Ian has taken an awful lot of the skills he's developed and understanding he has about how to create a biosecure unit with his poultry and has applied those to his goat enterprise.

And we really see that that has improved his output as well as improving the quality of the experience on the farm, both for us, for him, and also for his animals. So his yards are scrupulously clean. There's disinfectant not just on the way into the farm, but between pens so that we know that we're not taking disease from one pen to the next.

There's hand wash jam available. Now, we've just said that when Bluetongue came along, . It was being transmitted by you know, by an insert vector.

So none of those measures are actually going to help with that disease. But what I want us to try and start to consider is that just by having those measures in place, Ian is setting the agenda really on his farm and saying this is what I expect to happen when people come onto my farm. So I ask the question what is recognised as biosecurity, and I think it's this, isn't it?

This is what we all think about when we think about being biosecure, we think about cleaning trousers and boots that are already clean, so that we can say that we ticked that particular box and. I hope we get beyond that tonight, but it's not surprising that as vets we haven't necessarily had that level of engagement so far. This actually came from a New Zealand paper back in 2002.

It's referenced at the end, if anybody would like to go back to it. But it looked at biosecurity risks on farms, and this graphic was asking a question about who was responsible for it. The thing that struck me and concerned me really when I saw this graphic was that nowhere on there do private bets appear.

We've got right down the very bottom that the general public might refer into math if they have biosecurity concerns, but we don't have any role for the private memory, surgeon, so that I thought was a real shock and real concern. If we bring it forward a little bit and come closer to home, this is from, a paper released by DEFA in 2013 on the gov.uk website.

And, refers to how we might take charge of biosecurity on our farms. And this is much improved in my opinion. Firstly, because it starts to go beyond just thinking about the straw mat at the farm gate.

The key reason it said here, the top reason why we may have disease entering farms is because it's been brought on with the introduction of new animals. So it's really good to see that right up at the top. Only lower down the list does it bring in other issues that we may recognise as being of concern.

So people, especially workers between and within farms, and we're going to go on to look at, you know, the farm worker who brings BPD with them as a special bonus. Farm visitors and vehicles in particular, and the concern that I think we all have about contractors travelling between farms and biosecurity risk that that exposes people to. And only really quite a lot further down the bottom of the page and we start talking about wildlife and other things that we may consider to be more of a concern or may have been considered more of a concern by farmers, particularly when thinking about diseases like like TB.

Slightly further down there in the same document, we end up with this graphic, which basically is saying these are the steps you can take to prevent disease coming onto your farm. And what concerns me about this is what's missing from it. Remember back on that previous slide, we said that animals moving onto your farm was the biggest cause of risk to that to that farm.

And yet here we have this graphic, which nowhere on it does it have animal movements. So we're missing that big take home message from our own gov.uk website.

If we bring it even slightly further up to date though and have a look at the TB 5 point plan that was released as a multi-agency approach, including DEFRA last a couple of years ago now, what I'm really pleased about on this is that this does start to consider animal movement as being the biggest or a significant threat to biosecurity on farms. So we've got these 3 out of the 5, Points on the 5 point plan relate to farm movements, animal movements in some way. Moving on from that, I'd just like to reiterate something that I've already mentioned, which is about setting the agenda.

So setting out your stall and saying this is what I expect to happen, when people come onto my farm. And I'm going to ask you in a moment how many of your farmers insist on this kind of behaviour, but what I would like to say is What we've got on the screen here is the basics of any biosecurity gate place package. So we want some flagstones that we can actually stand on and be out of the mud when we clean ourselves off.

We need a bucket and a brush. We need some water and we need some farm 30. That's it.

And by my reckoning, when I went away and costed up that as a as a pack, I reckoned we could have that installed and ready to run on farm for somewhere around about 65 to 70 pounds. That is unlikely to break the bank of even the smallest smallholder. And really is .

A a token of gesture, yes, but a very important comment from that farm owner as to what they expect of the behaviour to be of people coming onto the farm. Beyond that we might think about vehicles and I've never come across a mister that works in quite this way, and I can see how this 1 may actually do some good, it may actually be cleaning this car and disinfecting it to a degree. If I refer back to my man, the chicken farmer, as you drive onto his farm, there's a pathetic little spattering of water that comes from these little jets on the side of the the drying.

I'm absolutely confident that it doesn't disinfect my car. It doesn't get into the wheel arches. It doesn't cover the wheels properly, it doesn't get onto the end chassis of the car, .

So it's actually not a biosecurity tool in its own right. But again, I'm gonna come back to this theme, but what it's doing is just setting that agenda and saying to me, as somebody who's visiting the farm, do you know what, you're going to have to be pretty bold to now drive through this, see all the biosecurity measures that I've got in place, and still have the audacity to come onto my farm dirty. And I think that's a really important thing.

So I'm interested to hear what percentage of your clients insist on you entering the farm clean to that level. If I could refer back to you, Rich, to, to launch that second poll. No problem James.

I'm just launching that 2nd poll now. So, as James says, what percentage of your clients insist on you entering the farm clean? None of them, 12, 1 to 10%, 11 2011 to 25%, 26 to 50%, 51 to 99%, or 100%.

And, and I should say just as we launched that Rich, I'm not getting hung up on the numbers here. I'm just after a kind of idea really of roughly what percentage of your of your clients you think this is relevant to. No problem.

So, let's say look, that's most people I answered, so I'll end it there. So, 8% have said none of them. 42% have said 1 to 10%, another 25% have said 11 to 25%.

17% have said 26 to 50%, and then 8% have said 51. So the vast majority between, 1 and 50%, have said that that's who, insist on entering the farm clean. So, relatively low numbers there, James.

Absolutely, and 3 quarters of us there at or below 25%, which is, you know, it is shocking but not actually any different, I don't think to what I would find in our own, our own practise. So I'd just like to summarise really what we've discussed so far because we're gonna move on now from the from the farm gate as it were . We've said that biosecurity is not all about the farm gate, but that's where the level is set and I'd like to use a little anecdote if I may do that, of where.

We, were involved in a case where a new vet had taken on a farm and Within a couple of weeks of that that taking on the farm, there had been a breakdown with BVD there were PI animals being born onto the farm and they were completely naive herd. There was also clinical infection going through the adult cows. And at the same time, unfortunately, they succumbed to an IVR outbreak, and we were having, we were seeing adult cow cows die on the farm at the point that we got there.

One of the comments that came from the farmer was that it must all have been the vet's fault because, and I quote, he just used a little splash of water to clean his boots. Now, you know, The BVD obviously couldn't have been that best fault that had happened months before if we were having PI animals born onto the farm. The IBR, I'm fairly confident it probably wasn't the vet's fault, but it was impossible to defend their actions in that situation.

And I think really coming to with that is it's not just about doing the right thing, it's about being seen to do the right thing. And you know, we aren't necessarily always considered to be at the top of our game. And fairly recently, a lab tech from a well known lab in southern Scotland was reporting to us that they could follow a salmonella outbreak around the vet's rounds, and they would see it spread from farm to farm to farm.

And really if you think about what that's doing to those farm businesses and the level of trust that we're having put in us, you know, that's quite shocking really, isn't it? I've mentioned this this bit about, you know, driving through the car cleaner and having the boot scrub and all the rest of it, but it's not just about the vet turning up and it's not just about the AI technician turning up. We had a a situation a couple of years ago on a farm where again BVD had got into the phone and in that case it was finally sort of tracked down to the fact that the lad who came in and helped them do some scraping out and feeding on a Saturday.

And was turning up in the wellies and the overalls that he wore on his own farm, and there was an uncontrolled BVD problem on that farm, and he transferred that in. And of course we don't see that for a number of months later until a number of months later when we're starting to get PI animals born, we're starting to have calf health deteriorate, we're starting to have fertility deteriorate. So these unseen and you know, silent menaces are are a serious concern.

One of my other roles is working with Improve International as a as an assessor for new OVs going out and approving their, their OV status. And a recent meeting of of all the OV assessors working through England. It was a common theme amongst all of us that our greatest concern often is seeing vets turn up, .

To to do their TB test either with they themselves being dirty, their PPE being dirty, or more commonly their vehicles and their kit being dirty. And There is always a reason. There is always a reason that I completely appreciate and completely understand from the pressures of working in practise.

Sometimes, you know, bosses are inconsiderate enough to leave these people on duty the night before they're due to meet me on farm at 9 o'clock to start their TB tests. They're possibly just rushed from doing a caesarean or a carving in order to be there in time to meet me. But I just don't think that we can accept any longer the comment that, you know, I'm really sorry I'm dirty today.

I've just had to rush on from another farm. I'm really sorry that all the kit in my car is filthy. I've just had to rush on from another farm.

Because, you know, the consequences of getting that wrong for those farmers are just too great, and it's not just about being there doing a TB test, that's about any visit we make to that farm. The consequence is just too great. In a way, I'm relieved to see that the rest of the country is, is just like Derbyshire, and you know, those figures are coming back with 3/4 of us having only, up to 25% of our farms insisting on us going on clean, you know, mimics, as I say, what we see in, in our area as well.

So I mentioned that we're gonna move on now and we're gonna have a look at the other aspects of TV because there's an awful lot of time when we're involved in farms, whether that's an advisory way or a consultative way, where we're not actually on farm washing our boots or seeing what's going on at that time. So we're going to look at these three aspects here, risk-based trading. Don't worry, we're not going to get into stocks and shares.

That was just the first graphic that came up for me. We're going to get into risk-based trading. We're going to think about vaccines, but more than vaccines.

We're going to think about resilience on farms, and then we're going to think about the local area risks as well. So we can move on and start with the first one of those, risk-based trading. And there's a number of resources that have recently become available to us to help with risk-based trading and advising on risk-based trading on farm.

And that's something which I think is only going to continue as the much awaited or long awaited livestock information programme begins to come down the down the channels. Livestock information programme, just in case anyone's heard of that before, is an initiative which is looking towards, and it's no further forward than that at the moment, but looking towards trying to ensure that there is a central hub. For all disease information relating to herds and relating to specific animals, which can then be utilised at markets in order to make some real-time risk-based judgments on the animals that you may be purchasing.

The graphic down in the bottom right here is such a simple graphic, but I really like it and this again has come from the the same death report that I quoted earlier and It just explains in some very basic visual images what it is that we're trying to achieve. What we're saying is as a purchaser, your risk should not be higher than the person you're buying from. So if you're a green herd, you can only buy from a green herd.

If you're a red herd, it doesn't matter where you buy from because you're probably buying stuff that's low risk than you anyway. So I think that's a really nice one to pull out and just show to our farmers and say, you know, have a look at this because it demonstrates what you can actually do for yourself. But I said we would talk a little bit about BVD and TV tonight, and they're the two things which have got more behind them from this point of view at the moment.

And where I'd like us to go is to say let's have a little look at IBTB. As a resource. If you haven't seen it before, this is what happens when you first open the website.

It's a completely free access website IBTB.co.uk.

And when we see the map of England and Wales, this doesn't work in Scotland. When we see the map of England and Wales, we can see where there are a cluster of breakdowns of TB. At the moment we're looking at ongoing breakdowns.

We could choose to look at closed breakdowns or indeed all types of them. And we're looking at ones that began in all years, and we can go right back to 2014, or we can continue to choose all years. We can then search within that map and we can search by either CPH number or we can search by postcode.

I'm gonna put in my postcode here, . Because I've done this before and it's actually quite helpful in terms of demonstrating what it is that I want to demonstrate. So there we are, you know, I mean, he talks to the, you know, I'm not on a farm, but this works for the for the things that I would like to be able to demonstrate to us.

And what we can see around me is that we've got this unit just down the road from me, which, if I click on that, will show us that they had a TB outbreak started in September 16 and it closed in February 17. I myself haven't had any TB at all. There's no blue dots under me at all.

If we look across the other side of town here, we can see that there's this double dot there. So we click on that, we can see we break down one or two. And so they had an outbreak from April 2016 through to February 2017, and then, ah, they're actually under an ongoing outbreak as well that started in May of this year and is yet to finish.

So there's open TB that far away from my house. There's the scale at the bottom so we can start to begin to think if I'm coming to buy a calf or a ball or whatever it may be from my grey dot here, do I consider it to be a risk if I know there's open TV there and there's TV that was closed last year there and possibly we just have a quick look over here which said there's TV that was closed last year there as well. This also helps to show one of the weaknesses of this system though, in that it is only the address of the registered holding which appears on the IBTV website.

So this here in the middle of town. You know, I suspect that there aren't an awful lot of cattle there, and yet it's showing that they had a 4 month breakdown last year. So what I suspect we've got there is probably a smallholder who has some land elsewhere, but that is their registered address for the farm for the holding.

So it doesn't necessarily always equate to where the animals have been kept. The other thing if you do get into using this website that is coming down the track is a change so that we can begin to see AFUs as a different status because at the moment it just shows things that are broken down. Sorry, things that are under a TV breakdown, which is obviously not fair for their status.

We move on again though and have a look at BVD here's a BVD free . England website and again, I'm afraid this is only an English scheme at the moment. There are different schemes in other parts of the United Kingdom, but how much easier could it be than this?

Look, you know, I'm going to buy this individual animal, click search. Has it been tested for BVD? Was it positive or negative?

I'm going to buy stock off this holding, click search. Did it have evidence of BVD the last time it was tested? Has it indeed been tested?

This is a service which costs almost nothing to our farmers to join up to. I say almost nothing because a lot of tag and test tag providers are covering the cost of the uploads to DVD free. But even if they're having to pay for it themselves, we're talking about 50% to upload a milk sample, 25% to upload a blood sample result or a tang a test result, .

We're not talking about huge amounts of money to get stuff registered on here, and it's a very real-time valuable resource to be able to start to consider what's going on on the farm. TV hub that I've got up on the top left of the screen now I deliberately put on this screen, but I'm not going to link us to at the moment. It is a really as a source of information for all things at TV, and I would encourage anybody who's looking at trying to improve their own farm biosecurity, .

Against TB, but obviously we get knock-on benefits for all sorts of other diseases as well to consult the TB hub and make sure that they're doing stuff which is . Tried and tested and approved of. But you know, there are other diseases that we should start to talk to our farmers about.

We should, I think, be leading conversations on IVR risk of digital dermatitis, you know, we've got farmers who haven't already got that, potentially mycoplasma, definitely yonis, you know, I mean, we're, we're in a situation where a study from America a number of years ago, which may feel irrelevant, but actually America is in a very similar situation to us in terms of overall yoni's prevalence. Said that if you go out and buy 40 untested animals, not high risk animals, just untested animals out of the market, you're pushing towards 100% likely to have bought in uni. So you think that those 40 animals could have come in over 10 years because that's how long it's going to take for the owners to really work its way through a system.

There are a lot of farmers who will potentially fall into that that trap, and, you know, we'll look at one or two of them as we move forward. I'd like to just Use a case example though to demonstrate where I feel that farmers' understanding of what biosecurity means, even when they think they're doing the right thing can go wrong, and I'd like to introduce you to Farmer John. And Farmer John a number of years ago now went out to market and he, and he bought a bulk.

Now you should know about Farmer John before we continue that he runs an IBR vaccinated herd. It's a big dairy herd, IBR vaccinated, and it's IBR vaccinated with live vaccine because every time the bulk tanketta is taken, it demonstrates that there's still a lot of wild virus around. So I don't want to get into a discussion about kind of live versus their vaccine.

Happy to take questions if you want to, but . There is an ongoing challenge to that herd from latently infected animals who've yet to be ridded out of the herd. So he went out to market and he spent 3000 guineas on this, on this stock and he brought it home and he took it out into the field and he was so happy when he bought this ball because he came home with a ticket on it that said that it was IBR free.

120 hours later I was called to the farm. It was a Sunday afternoon, and this was the first that we knew that this guy had bought his new bull. This is the first time that he'd consulted us at all on this new bull, and it was down in the field.

Its temperature was nearly 42 degrees. It had a nasal and ocular discharge. It was blowing its last.

We did what we could for it, but sadly the bull died a day or so later. It died in fact, having served 0 animals on the farm. And I just feel that we could have done an awful lot better for Farmer John if we'd have been engaged and had that dialogue with him about what immunity, what resilience, and what biosecurity meant before he'd approached the market on that day, and we'll come back to thinking about it when we think about vaccine and resilience shortly.

I'd like to bring it back towards TV just for a moment though and say, look, we've got a similar situation, and this is where I think IBTB is such a valuable resource, because we know that, from some work done in Wales, but there's absolutely no reason to think that the Welsh are in any way different to the rest of the UK with this. It's just that the work was done in Wales. But we know that, if you walk away from a persistently infected TB breakdown herd.

After its 2nd short interval test, roughly 25% of those herds will still be carrying undisclosed TB. So what does that tell me? That tells me that I really don't want to rely on that second short digital test or probably even the next pre-movement test as something to give me any confidence in buying stock off that farm.

That's all very well, but I can hear you saying, well, what about, you know, if I'm going over to buy something out of the low risk area, how am I going to cope with it there? And again, I would point you back to IBTB because part of the testing strategy in those 4 year parishes is to say that we try and test one farm in each parish, at least one farm in in each parish, every year. Doesn't always work.

The system isn't foolproof, but it's very good. And so by looking again at IBTV we can not just look at the unit that we're buying from, but we can look in the area around it and make a value judgement on whether it's a risk we're willing to take depending on what we find. And there's no hard and fast rules there.

This isn't about putting up boundaries to trade. This is about starting to consider whether the risk that we're about to expose ourselves to is one that we're comfortable with. So if we move on again and say we're gonna have a quick look at vaccines.

And I would call us back to that above episode really and say, look, you know, if, if Farmer John had spoken to us, you know, we could have stuck some vaccine into the bull on the trailer, intranasal injectable vaccine, whatever, and then we could have stuck it in isolation until that had taken. Obviously we wouldn't have used this isolation because as you can see, it's not rendered to a height of 3 metres, so it wouldn't have passed to farm insurance anyway, but we could have used isolation. But there's further work to do there in terms of understanding for these people.

So when we think about BVD, it's still a message that I feel we're having to get across about the idea of a Trojan calf coming in in even potentially in a vaccinated in calf animal, and helping people to understand how that can still be a risk to them. Moving on again, we're gonna look at the, the local area and say what's happening in the local area, and this is where dialogue between farmers really comes in. I often say on farms that there's an awful lot of break-ins on farms, but never any break out.

And so that's always the question that I will ask is about has anything broken into your farm recently? And what you can see here obviously is not a cow. This is a sheep with scab, and it's here really just to illustrate a tale of a high health, high welfare flock held not a million miles from us, roughly 4000 head of stock over a reasonably sized estate.

And you know, they, they had no scab on the farm and took as many precautions as they felt they could to prevent it coming on. But unfortunately, this sheep was found walking down the lane one day by a helpful member of the public who saw this sheep and thought this must have come out of that field and tipped the sheep into the field for them. And, you know, slowly over the next few weeks, scabs started to spread through that flock.

So That shows how easy it can be for this to break in. But what I'd like us to think about is where are the situations where we could take a bit better control than that, where we could try and actually work by getting our farmers to collaborate together and say, you know, how can we minimise the risk of disease for us all. So we'll bring Farmer John back up again and say, you know, Farmer John is now going to try and have a dialogue with this person on the right here.

I'm not sure I fancy their chances much looking at the face of Farmer John there, but. What about if they were to have a conversation that said, I can see you want to graze that field at the moment, which comes up against my boundary, and we haven't got a 3 metre clearance or we're worried about the integrity of that particular boundary. .

I tell you what though, I'm not going to graze that at the moment. I'm going to silage that field, and after I've silaged it, I could really do with grazing it for aftermath. So when you see me silaging it, how about you could take the stock off it then, and give me a few weeks at at that point.

That would be a great conversation to be being had. But even better, I would suggest would be a conversation that maybe went down the route of, look, I've got some results here that show the animals I intend to graze against your boundary. BVD clear.

I've recently screened them for IBR. That was clear. I haven't had a TV breakdown in the last 6 years.

I haven't bought anything in. So, you know, I think you should be good to graze your calves next to mine. But, you know, as long as you're equally confident about their house status.

So, you know, what can you tell me? And that may feel a bit, a bit fanciful in terms of getting farmers to engage in that dialogue. But I've seen this happen.

I've seen this work in practise. And where I saw it work was when we ran a session on BVD. And we worked on a specific area of the practise and actually brought in farmers from other practises as well, and said to them, we're gonna try and really focus on BVD in your area, and that's gonna mean that we all need to work together a little bit.

We're gonna start off by working out your own farm risks, and then we're gonna bring it together and see what we can do about the whole area. It still remains to this day the best farm of meat that I can remember being involved in. We brought these guys together.

Some of them don't even talk to each other on a day to day basis. And we sat them around, we gave them all some pie and chips, and we gave them an LS map of the area, and we gave them some red and green pens. And really that was where our involvement stopped.

Because very quickly we approached a situation where the conversations were happening between farmers. They were recognising that there were some people who weren't there, and they decided for themselves that the right thing to do with that was to draw a big red ring around their farms and just assume they were high risk and that's why they hadn't come to the meeting. But that sort of dialogue, that sort of comment on, I'll gra that in March, you raise it in April, whenever, began to happen and began to philtre through in that room.

It was really, really rewarding to see, and that's a little project that is still continuing on, you know, to this day. So I question, you know, what is the motivation for these people taking these risks, you know, we, we know, that they are taking them, and I, I just wonder why, because if we can understand the motivations, then perhaps we can get a little bit closer to thinking about how to talk them around from it. And one is about generating their business.

The number of people I'm a car for error. I don't go out and source the cards. I've got somebody who does that for me.

I don't know where they're going to come from. I don't know how often they're going to come in. You know, what can I do when they get here they're here, aren't they?

And I was having this conversation with somebody the other day, and what he was terrified about was was TB, terrified about the idea that you're buying an animal that was going to shut him down with TB and really put a kibosh on his whole process of taking animals through to be able to sell them out again at the other end. So what we agreed with him is that he couldn't change that part of his business model. He couldn't stop people ringing him and saying, I've got a lorry of carbs, I'm on my way with them.

But what he could do on the day they arrived was to take a look at all of their passports and start to look at where those animals come from and make those value judgments about what the local environment was like that they had come out of. And assign a risk score to them, how you, how you score them, but assign a risk score to them. And what he, he suggested he did a great suggestion was that he would keep a paddock that was gonna be his high risk paddock.

And he understood for himself that that didn't mean that he was going to stop TB arriving in those animals. But what it did do was to hopefully put a physical barrier between those animals and the rest of his herd, so that if and when TB got in to those animals, it would hopefully be restricted to them, and he can make a decision on whether he was going to sacrifice them, whether he was going to put them out through a red market, an orange market, or what he was going to do, but that hopefully it would put him into and out of restrictions much more quickly than if that disease had had the opportunity to amplify through the whole herd. So I thought that was a nice example really of how somebody has taken a look at their business model and said I need to continue doing this.

I recognise it's risky, but what can I do to mitigate that risk? The other side to it is their friendships, and I hope that's ably demonstrated by by the, the, the inhabitants of the 100 acre wood on the right hand side there. And I'm really fascinated by this, by the camaraderie and the loyalty shown from one farmer to another.

I've heard a number of times, you know, I, I know it's a risk to be buying my calves from Pharmac. But if I don't do it, who will? He needs to make a living too, you know.

And I'm intrigued if people have got kind of answers to that conundrum, then I'll be really pleased to hear them because I think about a client I was involved with for a long, long time before I left practise who . 12 12+ years ago, went to a herd dispersal sale that we had desperately encouraged them in a stronger terms as we could without breaching any kind of client confidentiality that it was likely to be a very risky purchase with regards to Yoni's disease. But sure enough he went, and sure enough he bought, you know, a load of animals at that sale and came back, very pleased with himself because he got them all at a good price, and they were gonna be the, the next best thing that happened to his herd.

And through the ongoing sort of Yoni screening system, we began to identify that there are an awful lot of these animals we sure enough were infected, and we reckon there was somewhere around about a 40% prevalence in his herds now that he brought these animals in. So, OK, we put in place a risk reduction strategy, a disease containment strategy, and that essentially involve carving dirty animals and having dry dry dirty animals in a separate area to the clean animals, all well and good. And every time we checked in on the cowman, he was able to assure us that he was doing that to the letter and that he was absolutely confident that things were going on OK.

Unfortunately, heifers that were born into that system started coming through and going down with high teachers of of yoni and some of them even became clinical with yonis very early on in their life, so they're obviously being exposed to huge levels of infection. And so we lost that sort of 3 years really where this cowman had actually been doing nothing of the sort and continued to expose that herd to an ongoing risk of amplifying that yoni. But at this point, we now think we're running at somewhere like 60% 0 prevalence in the herd.

And so a complete firebreak strategy was put in place and no more animals were reared on the farm, everything was bred to a terminal sire. That was it. What I find interesting in that is that even now a decade further down the line where they can see the sort of trail of devastation that's left behind them in terms of the reduced ability to improve their herd genetics and so on and so forth.

When you talk to those people, they say, yeah, of course we bought the cows. We promised him we would look after him. And I find that a really difficult one to break down, and I think we perhaps need to recognise that when something like that happens, all we can do is be there to try and minimise the impact on these farms.

But also there are motivations for security, and I would suggest that these kind of fall into four categories. Only in farmer attitude survey recently, only 42% of farmers have been motivated just by the pure finance. So I think the financial incentive is there and certainly whether the disease costs more than its prevention is is a big financial consideration, but I don't think we should always fall into the trap of just pursuing people on a pound shillings and pence basis.

I think we need to think also about the pride that they may hold in receiving that certificate up on the top left that says, well done. You are, you know, the highest health herd in your neighbourhood. And the visibility of that and the marketability of that I think is likely to increase as as livestock information programme comes further down the track.

For other people, you know, their best day of the year is when they get to take that prize effort and, you know, to the county show and to walk around the ring with it. The threat of not being able to do that is very often enough for some of these people to say, well, no, I'm not risking that. I'm going to start to take this a little bit more seriously and see what I can do to reduce the risk of it.

But also I think where we were just talking before about biocontainment and saying how can we work to consider reducing the spread of a disease on farm, accepting the business practises that you're already engaged with is a perfectly valid and perfectly sensible way to approach this. I would suggest that none of those four motivators, and I'm sure there's others that we could come up with together, is any more or any less valid than the others. They're different, and they're bespoke to their particular farmers.

But what they have in common is that they all need a working relationship with their clients to ensure that it works. And what we need to be making sure of in those situations is that we're pressing the right button to make sure that we're engaging them, turning them on to what we're doing in a way which is going to induce behaviour change to raise the bar on biosecurity in their home. So I'd like to close with my kind of little summary of that second half and we talk about there is again, so demonstrate, explain, and motivate, demonstrate, yeah, we need to get out there we need to be the people who are biosecure.

We are not a walking fomite. We can't be a walking fite. We need to explain to people what the, reasons are for putting in place the strategies that we're trying to put in place with them.

We need to discuss with people whether actually a straw mountain is going to be the best protection against bluetongue. And what they might do, which will give them a little bit more confidence that the actions they're taking are more likely to prevent disease. And then we need to consider what the motivators are for those particular farmers and engage them with those motivators to carry out the actions that we're talking about.

And I would suggest that if we can carry through all three of these levels, then disease is going to find it ever trickier to live and to spread between farms. That feeds into all of our kind of considerations on reducing antimicrobial usage as well as raising the herd health level of all the farms that we work with. But we, we tick a lot of boxes by reducing the ability of disease to live.

And allied to that, then should come a rise in the health status of the national herd. That's a great target, isn't it, that we end up at the end of all of our careers with a national herd which is healthier than it was at the start of our career. And I have that in mind.

That is my goal when I utter that sleep inducing word during a meeting that is biosecurity. I'd like to come to an end there and Make these couple of acknowledgements here to the papers that we referred to earlier on. There's a number of other people who probably should be referenced for information that's come together in the building of this slide pack, but at that point, I'd like to turn back to Rich please and say, you know, I welcome any questions this evening.

Thank you very much, James. And yes, as James says, if you do have any questions, please do post them now. Don't be shy.

Also, at the end of this presentation, there will be a short, survey that will pop up. Please do take a couple of minutes just to complete that. As I know James would appreciate the feedback and also we appreciate it as well because it helps us develop our programme for the forthcoming year as well.

So, all you need to do is pop in any questions in the little box at the bottom. I have promised James that we will, be finished in time for the second half, and I can see that Caer has hobbled off, so that's probably brought you a few extra minutes to have added on time at the end of the first half, James. So we've got a bit more time for questions before we, leave tonight.

One of the things I was just, interested at the, towards the beginning really with James, in terms of what people's, attitude was towards where they turn to for advice and guidance on biosecurity. And it's something that, you know, it always seems that going to vets seems to be quite low down on people's priorities or, on their radar of who they can turn to first. You know, is the more work that, you know, farm vets, large animal vets can do to, you know, raise that awareness and underline the sort of, you know, the role you can play in terms of advising and giving that guidance on what they can do.

I think that's a really important question, Rich and, and if I'm allowed to kind of cross promote webinars within the webinar that, I would refer people back to Alison Baird's excellent webinar last, I think last Tuesday night, about motivational interviewing, because, I think that where we are with this is that we are still respected by farmers and survey after survey demonstrates. We're still respected by farmers as being the go to place for knowledge, and our knowledge and our expertise is respected. But I'm sure we can all think of times during our career where we've said, do you know what, I've been telling you to do that for the last 5 years.

And finally, because Joe told you to do it over a pint last night, you've actually gone out and done it. And it's very easy in that situation to blame the farmer for not having taken the good advice that you were giving him or her. And I would suggest that actually, you know, good advice isn't good advice unless it's taken.

And we need therefore, I think, to consider our approaches in the way that we address these questions to make sure that we're gaining the buying of the people who are actually going to have to implement it on the ground. And my case with that, the only breakdown was classic for that. We fell into the trap.

We've made a huge mistake of thinking that we had to buy in of the herb man. We didn't. He couldn't see the point in what we were asking him to do.

He didn't believe it was going to sort the problem out, so we very quietly did nothing and made nods to us that that everything was fine. And the impact of that, you know, run through for, you know, for the last decade really. Yeah, I think that's always the case, isn't it?

It's, you, it doesn't matter if you can speak to the blue in the face, but then unless it's a John down the pub who swears by some remedy, then that's when they'll take heed. So, who, who needs to go to university for a number of years, just Listening to John down the pub. But no, as James says, the webinar by Allison is, available.

It is available for BCVA members. I'm sure many of you are BCVA members. So all you need to do is go to our website.

And if you just, go to the webinars page, scroll down slightly, and you'll see, in green, motivational interviewing and her health advice by Alison Bard, and then you can click on that. And if you're not already registered, you can register for that and view it. So, thanks for that cross promotion there, James.

The other thing, the other thing that came to mind, James, was, I think you mentioned earlier that obviously if we're, if we're leaving the 25% of, herds untested, is the TB test, you know, truly working? It is could the more be done? So we're leaving an undisclosed infection in, in 25% of these high risk herds.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised that question's come up because it is something that we, are faced with really as a, as a, as an ongoing challenge, isn't it, to justify what we're doing on farm in terms of TB testing when. You know, when so many subsequent breakdowns are seen, and I can't remember the exact data at the moment, but the number of pre-movement tests which have breakdowns, and we have now actually got to a situation where there's breakdowns following post-movement testing as well. So these animals are really getting through the system and not being detected.

I think what we have to remind ourselves with that is, you know, what that TB test is designed to do. It's designed to be a herd level test to try and identify with, you know, with a good degree of confidence, whether infection is present in that herd. My concern is that on occasion we start applying it as if it were a good individual test.

And the data varies slightly, but I think if we considered that it's sensitivity and an individual animal basis may optimistically be about 70%, then, you know, it does really beg the question as to whether the way we use it, the way we rely on it as an individual test is the most appropriate. That said, there's nothing better. And the number of animals that we detect by pre-movement testing with the skin test more than justifies in my mind, .

That risk that we are missing some and they're being allowed to spread through the countryside. I think the other thing that we have to acknowledge with something like TB, Yoni's disease would be exactly the same, is that the incubation phase is so long. We talk about a minimum of about 60 days, but it can be years.

You know, this disease can incubate for years. We're talking about a disease with an infectious load, you know, a minimum infectious load of 6 organisms, ultimately resulting in disease if the animal lives long enough. You know, it is not surprising that in some of the early stages of disease, that the test can fail to pick that up when it's looking for a kind of cellular immunity-based response.

So, yeah, really, really valid question. It does highlight, I think, one of the limitations in what we're able to do, but it's not to take anything away from the testing that we do do, which is still the very best that we can. Yeah.

No, definitely, and, you know, testing better than no testing at all, isn't it? Definitely. I've just got a comment from Jaragos.

He said most of the farmers, they don't pay too much attention regarding biosecurity inside the farm. So obviously that is, you know, a big part of this, and it's just something that I'm sure, you know, as farm vets, the role there is just to keep, you know, chipping away, giving them the information. You're trying to highlight the where the areas where they could improve and some how it almost finding that motivational factor, as you say, James, and, you know, and so I'm sure as a sort of a, a psychologist, you, you sure, I'm sure you're talking about motivational, factors quite often and obviously you've got Maslow and all the different sort of, theories out there where, you know, different people have different motivations, don't they?

And sometimes just finding that one thing that just clicks within a person and makes them switch on to what you're trying to tell them. Absolutely. And I think the, the point that Drago is getting at there as well, if I understand the question right, is about, the need to consider biosecurity within a farm as well as coming onto a farm.

And, and I'm, I'm pleased that that's come up. So I think that's an equally important point, you know, making sure that we're not, being, being the vector of disease around the farm as well is a, is a very valid point. So thank you for bringing that up.

No problem. Well, I think that is everyone. I don't think we have any other questions.

So all it leaves me to do is say thank you to my colleagues Dawn and Rob for being on hand and sorting out any issues we've had. Thank you to yourselves for attending. We do host a monthly, farm related webinar.

So please do join us, the first Wednesday of November where we will be once again, delivering a fantastic presentation. For those of you who, are interested on our, we've got our virtual congress coming up in on the 18th, 19th, 20th of January. And on the 20th of January, we have our, large animal day, which will have 6 hours dedicated to farm-related, topics.

So please do check our website for more information. And get yourself a ticket to that. And then obviously, finally, thank you very much to James.

A pleasure as always. And, James has kindly also provided a number of multi multiple choice questions. So if you wish to come back, within the next.

24, 48 hours onwards, you can watch this, webinar again and at the end, there will be, multiple multiple choice questions for you to complete just to help, underpin some of the, issues that James has gone over tonight. So, It pains me to say from a Man United fan to Liverpool fan, but good luck for the rest of the match, James. Hope it goes well for you.

And I wish you all a good night. Good night.