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You will often hear farmers complain about people sitting in offices coming up with schemes, rules and regulations and them not knowing what they are talking about.
“They might never have set foot on a farm in their lives,” is often an unfounded criticism levelled, but I have to say I agree with the sentiment when it comes to faecal sampling in the BEEP scheme.
It’s almost a month after the closing date and I still haven’t received back results for all the samples I sent away for farmers. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not for one second blaming the labs. They were completely inundated with samples and did their best to get through them as quickly as possible.
Backlog
I know we were sending away over 20 times the weekly norm for a period of three to four weeks and it was the same all over the country. As there are only seven approved labs in the country, one would expect them to be under pressure.
No, I blame the Department for not thinking through the practicalities of that part of the scheme. While a good enough idea in theory, it just didn’t work in practice. I’m all for getting farmers to use more faecal sampling instead of just randomly using anthelmintics, and anything that helps promote that is in my opinion a good thing.
Sampling
I think if farmers had been asked to dung-sample their calves for worms in the summer it would have worked well. Farmers would have been interested in the information they got back plus the testing period could have been spread over three to four months.
However, with the fluke testing, things were slightly different. Faecal testing for liver fluke looks for fluke eggs in the dung. Adult fluke need to be present in the animal in order for eggs to be present. It takes 12 weeks from the point at which the animal ingests the fluke until the fluke reaches the adult stage.
As we also know we need a mud snail for the fluke to complete its life cycle. Simply put, if we have dry weather, we have no mud snails, and if we have no mud snails, in theory we should have no fluke. If we cast our minds back, we had a very dry spring this year right up until early June and 12 weeks from mid-June is mid-September, meaning there was really no point testing before this.
This left approximately a six-week window, and as human nature dictates leaving everything to the last minute, most of the samples went in in the last two or three weeks, thus creating pandemonium.
Results
But leaving all this aside, faecal testing for fluke is at best unreliable and at worst very unreliable. As I’ve already said, adult fluke need to be present for eggs to be present, which means an animal could be carrying a very heavy burden of early immature or immature fluke and still show a clear test.
Also, even if adult fluke are present, they shed eggs sporadically, meaning a test can still come back negative. It all amounts to meaning a positive test tells you something but a negative test tell you nothing.
The BEEP test also gave a result for rumen fluke which can often come back positive but if animals appear healthy can usually be ignored. The advice I find myself giving out is odd to say the least: “If your cows are positive for rumen fluke and appear healthy, just ignore the result, they’ll be grand. If they are negative for liver fluke, just ignore that result and treat them anyway!”
Faith
The conflict between the result and the advice, and the length of time it took to get the result, means I’m finding farmers have little faith in it. Sometimes don’t really care if they get it or not.
Not really the objective the scheme was hoping to achieve.
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