Being Scottish, I have the pleasure of getting dressed up in a kilt from time to time. A kilt is awesome: you can wear it at weddings, at funerals, at parties and at rugby games.
The downside to being Scottish is that you have to watch the Scottish rugby team lose against top teams like Ghana and Liberia.
It’s the same with Germany. We all know that the Germans design the best and most reliable cars in the world. They won the soccer world cup and en route ruthlessly demolished everyone’s favourite team, the Brazilians. They hold up the entire economy of the EU. But they don’t understand Fawlty Towers.
Southland has a wealth of awesome stuff. It has Fiordland with the most amazing scenery this side of Norway. It has tuataras, and stags, and it has the best café in New Zealand, and it has Stewart Island. The things it hasn’t got make it awesome too – no theileria, no facial eczema, no droughts, and hardly any people.
And we have swedes. Southland is renowned for its swedes. Southland swedes make winter a better place and hence keep the whole New Zealand economy going even when we are under a foot of snow. They feed sheep, deer, cows and even people. They’ve been around for around half a century and despite some attempts to knock them off their perch with new fancy things like fodder beet, they still define the Deep South.
And then this year, they turned. Our favourite food bit back.
We always lose a few cows on swedes. If we transition them well we lose fewer, and if we vaccinate them for all clostridial diseases we also lose fewer. But there are always losses. So a few cows dying in early winter was unexceptional. Then we noticed some unusual sick cows, where we had some strange blood results coming back, suggesting liver disease. And then we did a few post mortems on what we assumed were cows dying of acidosis and found more liver disease.
We began to think something strange was happening, Farmers were all talking about a new swede that we’d never much heard of, and were all making their own conclusions. We sent an email out to all our vets across VetSouth and asked for any cases that could be linked. Pretty quickly we had 15 farms across our clinics with similar symptoms.
We pulled the data together and alerted all our vets. The lab at Invermay was invaluable in helping us understand what was going on and in getting involved. (When they all get relocated to somewhere urban, who will be at the coal face for disease then?) Then we contacted all the local vets in Southland and Otago and got them all together to share cases. It became apparent that other clinics had also had a few cases, but nothing like our number. By this time we were up to more than 30 farms.
The rest is history. Everyone has now agreed that swedes have been causing liver damage, sick cows and a number of deaths, and in particular the HT swede seems to be a greater risk. The working hypothesis is that the mild winter and increase in leaf has led to a build-up of glucosinolate toxins in the leaf. The HT swede has a higher leaf proportion too, and this is probably significant. Transitioning cows between crops might also be a risk. We don’t know if all this is the case but at the moment it fits. Will it happen again? We have no idea.
What this issue has demonstrated is the value of simple things like getting cows autopsied, getting sick cows checked, and running bloods on unusual things. If we hadn’t done these things early in the piece on some farms we would have been a month later in getting on top of the problem and many more cows would have died across the region. Getting your vets involved, and having a good relationship with them, so you can ring up and discuss anything unusual, pays dividends.
And it’s also shown that, despite the riches of Southland and all the great things about living here, we still have our equivalent of the Scottish rugby team, or Hilda’s hairy armpits. And occasionally they rise up and bite us back.
Dr Mark Bryan is a director and practising veterinarian at VetSouth in Southland. He is an executive member of the Society of Dairy Cattle Vets of New Zealand and owns shares in a dairy farm.
