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The Department of Agriculture is to provide a tailored TB risk report to all cattle farmers in the coming days.
These individualised reports will notify farmers of their herd’s TB risk category and provide specific advice on how to reduce risk of TB.
Plans for herd-specific TB reports were first revealed by the Irish Farmers Journal in July.
Documents seen by this paper detailed how the letters would identify individual animals within herds that were at a higher risk of contracting the disease.
The Department stressed that farmers were already provided with information on their TB risk, but that the new report presented the information in a more user-friendly, detailed and practical way.
TB Forum
The need to develop herd risk categories that were “simple, clear, and convey sufficient information to enable farmers to make the decisions” was one of the recommendations of the Bovine TB Forum’s interim report. It also identified the need to provide farmers with ways to reduce risk.
Along with the issuing of TB herd history risk statements, the Department said it had advanced a number of other recommendations of the report.
An independent review of the on-farm market valuation scheme, which provides compensation to farmers affected by a TB outbreak, has been commissioned.
It is focusing on whether farmers are receiving accurate market values for reactor animals.
A broader cost-benefit analysis of the TB programme as a whole has also been commissioned.
Resources
An additional 16 posts across policy, operation, wildlife and laboratory services have been sanctioned by the Department at a cost of €1m/annum.
It said: “The objective of these measures is to provide farmers with new tools to reduce their own risk, and to target additional Departmental resources at in a way that will have a real impact on the incidence of a disease that results in the imposition of significant cost on every livestock farmer in the country.”
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