After nearly three months in my new role as animal health specialist with the Irish Farmers Journal, there are some strong recurring themes that keep appearing.

While most farmers have questions about diseases that are affecting them on their farms, I can’t help but think of the issues that will affect us all in the future.

Nobody has escaped the conversation about antibiotic resistance for the last number of years.

This is where the antibiotics we have relied on in human and animal medicine are becoming resistant to the bugs we are using them for.

Like most problems that are big and seem far away, that don’t affect us today, they can be forgotten about. Antibiotic resistance is now a big scary reality for us all, even though our usage in farm animals is quite low.

Can we do better?

Of course, we can improve and reduce our usage. In fact, we will be forced to reduce our usage over the next number of years. We still need antibiotics but just need to use them more prudently.

There will be particular focus on category two critically important antibiotics which are first-line medicines in human health. These are products like the fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins which we really must reduce, if not actually stop using completely.

If we look at the recent EU legislation, there is a big push to remove oral antibiotics in feed, treating healthy animals to prevent them getting infections and remove CIA (critically important antibiotics) from food animals.

Moving ahead

Other countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have moved ahead on this front. They have had no animal health disasters. With good use of available low-risk antibiotics, little has changed.

Looking at areas where high levels of antibiotics are being used on farm is a good start. We can do this by simply looking at our medicine records over the last two years to see which antibiotics we are using and why. Then we can focus on the areas where we might be using more and see what strategies we can use to prevent these problems.

For example, in some of our flocks, putting a lameness control programme in place with the aid of vaccination where required can make an impact on lameness. In beef farms, pneumonia is an area where we can make a huge impact by looking at management.

In both dairy and beef herds, colostrum management can always be improved to make the greatest impact on calf health. We can stop using oral antibiotics for calf scour that is caused by viruses and cryptosporidium.

In dairy-to-beef units, it can really make a difference where we source calves, looking at diets and levels of milk feeding. This is an area where group treatment of bought-in stock is something we will be able to do less of.

On dairy farms, mastitis is an area where we can reduce antibiotics and look towards selective dry cow therapy over time. When we use non-milk withdrawal drugs to treat uterine infections/lameness, these are cephalosporins which are in that category of critically important antibiotics. We must no longer routinely use these drugs on farm.

Why? We won’t be allowed as they will possibly be removed, except where very good reason is given.

I recently visited several international countries looking at their farming systems. On a calf-rearing unit, I came across a case where a whole batch of calves had been infected with salmonella that were resistant to every drug the farm vet had available. They lost 80% of the calves in the batch.

World leader

While leaving the unit, I saw there was an area for the kids of workers to play in while their parents worked. This made me stop and think that globally we have issues. While Ireland is doing some great work, we can’t be complacent and instead aim to be world leaders in reducing antibiotics.

I’m currently building some programmes around using antibiotic usage for beef, sheep and dairy farms. I look forward to piloting/reporting on this with some farmers and vets next year. There is no doubt our antibiotic usage will be changing on farms over the coming years.

Let’s be leaders on this one, not followers.