Even in the wake of Mycoplasma bovis’s devastating impact on individual farms and an $880 million initiative to eradicate the disease, farmer focus on on-farm biosecurity remains light at best.
AgResearch scientist Mark McNeill said in his role working for AgResearch he felt compelled to treat biosecurity seriously when visiting farms, and took precautions that reflected that.
“That includes washing my vehicle well with disinfectant, avoiding going into paddocks and wearing booties over my gumboots. I do feel though that it is sometimes still looked on as being a bit over the top.”
He appreciates many drystock and dairy farmers have had less awareness of the implications of biosecurity and it is simply a reflection of human behaviour that people often don’t act until something is materially affecting their lives or businesses.
“Health and safety get higher priority, biosecurity not so much.
“I do wonder if M bovis was to be dealt with, would we see an even lower priority around it? Ideally we would like to instead see procedures be included as part of business practice.”
His concerns are echoed by Nuffield Scholar recipient Simon Cook who examined on-farm biosecurity practices here and abroad for his 2018 scholarship.
“Post-Psa there was a lot of attention paid to spraying and cleaning equipment but once the disease had spread that has dropped away. Really, there are procedures we should be sticking to, not so much to cope with Psa but to help prevent whatever disease it is that follows Psa.”
Cook said WorkSafe research has identified two key reasons farmers farm are the same reasons they loath to voluntarily adopt biosecurity measures.
“They farm because they want to make their own decisions about their business and because they prefer to work alone.
“So, as soon as you require changes to things like biosecurity they are unlikely to pick up on it voluntarily and only through regulation will those requirements be adopted.”
McNeill agrees with these findings and said AgResearch has invested in social science research to help learn how best to affect behavioural change around biosecurity.
Research by him and his colleagues has highlighted just how great the vulnerability of NZ farms to biosecurity incursions really is.
A study of dirt on international visitors’ footwear through Auckland and Christchurch airports found over half the samples had seeds in the dirt, two-thirds had nematodes and almost all had fungi and all had bacteria present.
Perhaps surprisingly, more than a third also had the body parts of insects in them.
The researchers concluded that given the high occurrence the cost of disinfesting soiled shoes could probably be justified. The work also highlighted the risks NZ farms are at, given the increasing link between tourism and farm visits.
“I think those farms and orchards that have a direct link to tourists do appreciate the risks and act accordingly.”
McNeill’s experience monitoring the devastating clover weevil outbreak in the 90s highlighted how farmer behaviour can exacerbate a pest’s spread.
“It moved from the North Island to South Island and in Canterbury that came directly from livestock transported south.
“We found hotspots of the pest in paddocks in at Culverdon and north of the Waimakariri.”
At a community level engagement has been lifted in the past year with the launch of a new region-wide biosecurity initiative in Western Bay of Plenty, the Tauranga Moana Biosecurity initiative.
As an umbrella organisation it includes the earlier Port of Tauranga biosecurity initiative that aimed to engage with all immediate and indirect employees, suppliers and companies interacting with the port.
John Kean of AgResearch’s biosecurity team said the initiative has worked to get all community groups engaged about biosecurity in a region that felt the sharp end of biosecurity incursion from Psa in 2011.
It has included getting iwi and schools on board, including a partnership with House of Science, a charitable trust aiming to raise scientific literacy among children.
Biosecurity board games and a very popular sentinel garden that helps draw in unwanted pests are all a part of the link to children learning more about biosecurity’s importance.
“We are also using social scientists to survey port workers, transitional facility workers and the general public (through Facebook) about their perceptions of biosecurity.
“We will then resurvey them in a couple of years to track how successful the initiative has been in raising awareness.”
Kean said it is an unfortunate reality that often the communities most receptive to biosecurity education are those that have borne the sharp end of an incursion.
However, he is encouraged in the interest the port initiative has created among other port facility management around NZ.
“When people start to see biosecurity impacting on lifestyle, like the impact of the guava moth on feijoas in Northland, they tend to start to take notice.”
