Friday, March 29, 2024

Elephants in the room

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The New Zealand dairy industry has always been very good at measuring what it does – its processes and its outcomes. Because of that it has always had good, efficient production, and has been amongst the leanest of the dairy industries globally.
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The backbone of this success has been the dairy industry’s ability to measure various aspects of production. Things like stocking rate, production/ha, milk composition, volume, somatic cell counts, costs of production, profitability, and even feed conversion efficiency can be measured on an almost daily basis. They can be benchmarked against similar farms or similar systems, locally or nationally, or even internationally.

Having good quality, objective information coming in regularly helps us focus on areas that are falling behind, which in turn drives improvements against the better performers. It’s probably been the lack of regular measuring and monitoring in the red meat industry that’s partly behind its relative weakness in the sector.

And yet for some reason, the NZ dairy industry has always had an almost pathological fear of measuring animal health. There seems to be some feeling that this is unnecessary, or too wasteful, or too European, or too expensive.

All this is just plain daft. Animal health under most Kiwi dairy systems would be superior to that under most other systems worldwide. Yet, unless we can measure and record it, we are leaving ourselves wide open to attacks from our competitors.

Pick a disease, any disease; displaced abomasum, metritis, lameness, acidosis, even mastitis. I would suggest that they are far less common under NZ dairy systems than any other western system. Yet we can’t prove it because we have little or no data. And because we can’t prove it we can’t market it.

All this is disappointing. For years we have been missing out on an opportunity to market ourselves and our industry. We need decent individual ID, and we need to record disease. It needs to be collated somewhere centrally and it needs to be presented on every occasion we can find.

It’s our biggest weakness as an industry. Except it isn’t any longer, and not because we’ve suddenly started collecting it. It’s because we have a new biggest weakness in our industry, our measurement of antibiotic use.

You will all have read or heard about antibiotic resistance in humans – it’s become a hot topic and with good cause. There’s every possibility the new vet graduates coming out this year will have to manage disease without using antibiotics at some stage in their careers. This is scary stuff as we’re looking back to medicine pre-World War Two.

It can be as complicated as you want to make it. But the simple take is that for the past 70 years we have been very successful globally at killing bugs with antibiotics. However we rarely kill all bugs, and the ones that we leave behind – the ones resistant to the antibiotic that we use – grow and multiply. In time, their resistant genes spread to other bugs, and the problem of resistance grows. Long courses, low doses, poor treatment regimes, exposure to other species, and badly made drugs are the major contributors to the development of resistance.

Global traffic means that people carrying antibiotic-resistant bugs can easily transmit these pathogens around the world within 24 hours. No place can be considered isolated. At a recent conference an expert in antibiotic resistance suggested that all overseas workers on dairy farms should be swabbed first for key resistant bacteria.

People are reluctant to stop using antibiotics in humans, so they look to farming. What they find scares them. There may be no scientific link between low levels of antibiotic use in, say, poultry and human antibiotic resistance, but science has always come second to consumer perception. In NZ, for example, we used around 53 tonnes of antibiotic a year in all animals according to Welfarm data 2013-2014. Almost half goes into pigs and poultry. But how much goes into dairy cows? And why? And how?

It will come as no surprise that we don’t know. Again we’re let down by the lack of data in our biggest and most important industry. I would suggest that we have little to fear from the information as I suspect we’re doing a pretty good job. But unless we can demonstrate it we are at high risk of people outside the industry throwing stones. In Holland for example, a single political whim meant that the food industry has had to halve its antibiotic use over five years.

A couple of smaller studies have suggested our antibiotic use is low compared with overseas. Welfarm data suggests we are probably using about a quarter to a third when compared with Europe or North America, as shown in a paper, Patterns of antibiotic sales to dairy farms in the Waikato region, presented by Chris Compton and Scott McDougall at the recent Dairy Cattle Vets Conference.

However, we have no comprehensive antibiotic use information and if we don’t measure it, we can’t benchmark it. Or market, defend, or improve it. 

A group of vet clinics across the country last year began a welfare initiative called Welfarm, recording, analysing and benchmarking animal health and productivity data. We included nationwide antibiotic use data for the first time. This year the number of farms enrolled on Welfarm is expected to double, and the data available will be valuable to the industry at this critical time.

Last year, we started challenging our larger dairy farm clients to reduce antibiotic use by 10% a year. We think it’s a sensible start. Like disease in dairy cattle in NZ, antibiotic use is probably low and compares very well with the industry overseas. But then again, we don’t know.

Dr Mark Bryan is a director and practising vet at VetSouth in Southland.   

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