Friday, March 29, 2024

New FE research swings into action

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This year’s devastating facial eczema challenge will hit many farmers hard at the production and processing ends of their business. The worst affected and those taken by surprise this year will be planning how to avoid such losses in coming seasons. Anne Hughes investigates. The Facial Eczema Action Group has been working behind the scenes for the past two years, concerned at a lack of facial eczema (FE) research and development in all farming sectors. King Country farmer Robert Carter said industry research on FE had been stagnant for far too long. The action group held a forum late last year to identify what areas of research and development should be targeted, how to get these projects off the ground and the ways of getting information to farmers on dealing with FE in sheep, beef, dairy and deer. A steering group – consisting of breeders, Beef + Lamb New Zealand staff and farmer council members, scientists and DairyNZ representatives – is now deciding how the research and development wish list should be prioritised. Carter, also a B+LNZ farmer council member, said immediate priorities would likely include reviewing how sporidesmin was produced.
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If the cost can be reduced more sheep and cattle could be tested for tolerance, he said. Information available to farmers also needs reviewing so key data can be quickly dispersed to farmers deciding how to deal with FE.

Included in this review will be the Facing Up to Facial Eczema booklet, released to the sheep industry in the 1990s.

While this is still a useful resource for farmers, and is available on B+LNZ’s website, it will be updated to include more modern information.

Once a plan has been set it will be time to talk money and find funding.

“The steering group will morph into being a governance group for FE research,” Carter said.

In one year’s time he expects the group to have refreshed FE information available to farmers.

Within five years, he hopes better tools will be available for farmers in genomics and to help breeders determine which genetics are truly tolerant to FE for beef, sheep, dairy and deer.

Carter said the current lack of research into FE may be because of the lack of a focused drive from industry and a tendency of farmers to bury their heads in the sand until a bad outbreak, such as occurred this year.

The Carters’ experience

It’s more than 20 years since Robert and Suzanne Carter suffered large losses of ewe hoggets to facial eczema.

“You spend a lot of time awake at night and wonder what you can do – you feel desperate,” Carter said.

To reduce risk the Carters sought FE-tolerant genetics to start breeding into their Coopworth flock on their Kirikau Valley farm, 30 minutes’ drive southeast of Taumarunui.

After five years, tolerance had built up enough that losses from FE during a challenge were almost nil.

Through the Ramguard programme the Carters have been testing for FE tolerance in their Coopworth stud flock – with the highest sporidesmin rate of 0.6mg/kg – for eight years.

This is where the animal is dosed with the toxin and blood tests assessing liver damage measure how tolerant the ram is to the FEcausing toxin.

‘Breeding for tolerance is the only sensible long-term thing to do.’

Even highly-tolerant animals can still be infected with FE in challenging seasons. A highly-tolerant flock should be able to get through a challenging season with fewer deaths, fewer clinical and sub-clinical signs while maintaining productivity.

This autumn has been hugely challenging in some parts of the country. The Carters saw three lambs out of a total of 1800 showing clinical signs of FE.

Fewer than 1% of lambs sent for processing were condemned for jaundice (yellow fat and tissue), a sign commonly related to liver damage caused by FE.

They are expecting similar production results to last year. FE risk can be monitored through spore counting and animals protected through zinc treatments or a fungal spray on pastures.

Animals can also be fed alternative crops during a challenge such as chicory, plantain or other crops generally free from FE.

Carter said one challenge to these approaches was that the disease can be prevalent in different areas of the farm from one year to the next, which was very much a micro climate phenomenon.

“Breeding for tolerance is the only sensible long-term thing to do.

One worry with that has been that we might lose productive capacity, but the most productive sheep are FE tolerant because they’re healthy and breeders are also selecting for the number of lambs born, growth and meat yield.”

Before buying FE-tolerant rams, farmers need to know to what level the sheep are being tested. Ask the ram breeder or look it up on the Ramguard or FE Gold websites.

“Farmers need to educate themselves and there are opportunities to do that. A lot of farmers have to realise that it’s not their fault,” Carter said.

Introducing tolerant genetics takes time and might require farmers to be more open-minded of the breeds of sheep they farm.

“It’s not about breeds, it’s about genes.”

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