“We knew the longer we took to find these animals, for them to be tested, the longer we were going to be in the response and that could be expensive because we were under movement restriction,” Cara, who also works in the DairyNZ, Beef + Lamb compensation assistance team, says.
The Gregans’ farm in the Hunter area on a property that’s been in John’s family for more than 100 years and today they milk about 1100 cows on 360ha. Originally John followed in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps and was a passionate sheep farmer but 10 years ago he converted to dairy.
“We were leasing two neighbouring farms and running this farm and at the time we were running 7500 ewes. The owner of one of the farms wanted to sell so we bought it but the only way we could make it work was by converting it to dairying,” John says.
For three years he continued to run sheep on the home farm, which was a BLNZ monitor farm, while dairy farming on the new property but then decided it too should be converted.
Meanwhile, Cara who had put her banking career on the back burner while their three children grew up, was looking at returning to work outside the farm.
“I did the Agri-Women’s Development Trust Escalator governance and leadership programme and was helping the Rural Support Trust. Then Mycoplasma bovis came along and it just evolved to become my full time work,” she says.
As farmers and officials worked to understand the disease few had even heard of, the demand for help from the trust quickly increased.
“What became really obvious was that one of their biggest stresses for affected farmers was compensation and understanding it,’ she says.
“Being a banker trained in doing facts and figures I started working on helping them prepare their claims.”
As a result the team was set up to help farmers prepare compensation claims and has since helped more than 800 farmers. The team is now 10 strong and dedicated to helping farmers work through their compensation for losses incurred because of MPI exercising its power to restrict stock movement or order animals to be destroyed.
“Our team is one of the success stories of the response I believe. We’ve got some really great people who’ve been farmers or who are farming and have the technical expertise. We’re all very fair and reasonable, that’s the line, and it has to be fair and reasonable on both sides.
“To do a really good job we knew we needed to be nimble, for example a phone conversation and email rather than me driving two hours to see someone to pick up information. I could have had their claim done in that time so it’s being efficient in the use of resources.”
While Cara was helping other farmers with their compensation claims she and John found themselves affected directly by the M bovis response, as they discovered there were animals of interest on their own farm.
“We had two years previously bought in R2 in-calf heifers from a farm who had bought them from a farm that became a restricted place. All the animals that left that property or came on to it were traced so casing and tracing rung and said ‘you’ve got animals of interest’,” Cara recalls.
“We thought we need to front foot this. We need to understand the animals because all we get is EID tags and birth IDs. They don’t tell you where they’ve come from or anything.”
The Gregans used the tag numbers, along with their Nait and Minda records to quickly identify the suspect animals and drafted them off and marked them while they waited to hear from MPI what the next move would be.
“We drafted them off because I knew from my work in response that some farmers’ time in the response is delayed because they hadn’t found the animals.
“So the longer you take to find the animals, to get them sent as trace animals and tested, the longer you’re going to be in the response.
“It was all about reducing our time under notice that was the whole outcome we wanted.”
The 30 cows identified were killed and tested, revealing they were not infected but the Gregans accept the process was necessary. And a subsequent census and blood tests showing their herd was clear of M bovis was a welcome bonus.
“The thing you have to remember is if they had tested positive, as New Zealand dairy farmers our herd would have been replaced and our loss of production would have been replaced. If we’d had to sell down cows because we had a drought or whatever the cost would have been on us.”
John says they made a point of treating everybody involved with respect and accepting the situation they were in.
“We realised the people who were coming to confirm the animals and do the census and ultimately cull the animals were just doing a job so we were as co-operative as possible. We didn’t put up any barriers.”
“Farmers need to understand that MPI and everyone involved are all there doing a job and they have the best intentions and want a positive outcome for you,” Cara says.
Her advice to farmers in a similar position is to be proactive and set up a robust system to cope with all the information flooding in.
“I bought a folder with dividers to file all the paperwork. I had a book where I took a note of all the conversations with people and phone calls because after a while it just blurs. I scanned all the files that John had so I could easily access information as I needed it, which just took that stress away.
“For us it was about shoring up the team, making sure everybody understood. We had a lot of meetings with our staff and got them to work with us when we did the census, tidying up tags, identifying cows so they were very much part of the process because we felt the more knowledge and understanding of the process, the less the fear.”
