Farmers who fail to comply with rules around Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) in NI, look set to have herd movement restrictions put in place from early 2025, officials from DAERA have confirmed.

Briefing the Stormont Agriculture committee on Tuesday, Mervyn Dunlop from DAERA said the changes being introduced will have minimal impact, given most farmers have complied with the BVD compulsory testing requirements introduced in March 2016.

For those who remain non-compliant, they won’t be able to move cattle in or out of their herds, except for direct slaughter. However, all farmers with breeding herds should note that if a random persistently infected (PI) calf is uncovered, they too will be caught under the new rules.

Main issues

Dunlop told MLAs that the changes are intended to deal with three main issues delaying eradication and include further rules to discourage farmers from retaining PI animals.

There is also the “silent spread of infection” by animals that are transiently infected after being exposed to a PI calf. These animals normally recover after approximately three weeks, but by that stage might have been sold on to another herd.

Also spreading infection are so-called Trojan animals, which are females exposed to the virus during pregnancy. They might have previously had a negative BVD test, but their calf could end up as a PI.

The third issue dealt with in new legislation relates to the failure by some farmers to BVD test all their animals.

Amendment

In practice, two pieces of BVD legislation are going through Stormont. The first is an amendment to the BVD eradication scheme order 2016 which will target those farmers with untested pre-2016 born cattle. At present, there are fewer than 700 cattle on farms that don’t have a direct or indirect (via a calf) negative test result. These cattle will have to be tested via a blood sample taken by a vet or using a tissue tag.

The second piece of legislation is a new BVD control order, which introduces the provisions to allow the Department to implement herd movement restrictions.

Similar to ROI

The restrictions are being phased in over the next 12 to 16 months and are similar to the actions taken by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) in the Republic of Ireland.

According to the DAERA officials, good progress has been made with BVD eradication in NI since 2016, but that progress has “plateaued over the last two years.”

That is in contrast to the situation in ROI, where a compulsory testing has been in place since 2013, along with financial incentives to remove PI calves. In addition, ROI started implementing movement restrictions in 2016 as well as a process of notifying neighbours that an outbreak had occurred.

The result is that ROI is now “7+ years” ahead of NI in terms of eradicating the disease, suggested Dunlop. That is also reflected in the latest figures which show animal incidence rate in NI is 0.198% compared to 0.005% in ROI. Herd level incidence in NI is 2.44% versus 0.16% in ROI.

“It is critical we stop the introduction of new outbreaks. Movement restriction is critical to that. There is a clear history of these measures being successful [in ROI],” Dunlop told MLAs.

Scenarios where DAERA will restrict herds

There are three new types of herd restrictions being introduced by DAERA.

The first relates to when a positive or inconclusive test result for a calf is notified to a herd owner.

Initially, the farmer will be given 28 days to destroy the animal or have a negative retest result.

Three months after the legislation is introduced, this 28-day grace period reduces to seven days and nine months later (12 months after the legislation is introduced) it drops to zero days.

In other words, herd movement restrictions will apply immediately following a positive BVD test result.

This movement restriction will only be lifted 21 days after the PI is destroyed and assuming all other animals have a negative BVD status.

Scenario 2

The second scenario relates to cattle with an unknown BVD status, which includes animals that haven’t been tested since the compulsory programme was introduced in 2016.

In total, there are around 16,000 cattle aged over 30 days with unknown status, which should have been tested since 2016. Over 1,000 herds are “largely compliant”, but they have one or two untested animals.

However, there are nine herds that each have over 100 untested cattle, confirmed Mervyn Dunlop.

Individual animal movement restrictions already apply in these herds.

In the first four months after the new legislation comes into force, the maximum allowed (before herd movement restrictions apply) will be 20 untested cattle.

After 10 months, this threshold drops to 10 or more untested cattle and six months later, it drops to five or more.

Scenario 3

The final scenario relates to the Trojan females potentially exposed to a PI in pregnancy.

Where a herd is restricted due to having a PI calf, individual animal movement restrictions will be placed on all females aged over 12 months.

DAERA has previously suggested this restriction could remain in place for up to 41 weeks after the removal of the last PI.

Animals can still move to slaughter, while the individual restriction will also be lifted if the animal produces a BVD-free calf.