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Since taking up the post, agriculture minister Edwin Poots has been encouraging MLAs to back his approach to bovine TB.
He favours the model used in the Republic of Ireland of targeted culls of badgers in TB hotspot areas, and to follow this up with vaccination of badgers in the areas surrounding a cull zone.
Given that badger culling is controversial, the minister requires support across the Stormont Executive.
While there haven’t been any dissenting voices in public as yet, the whole issue remains rather delicately poised.
Step forward Dr Dick Sibley, the vet who has worked with a 350-cow Devon farm to rid it of bovine TB (see page 6). He is generally against badger culling, instead favouring the use of various different tests to identify cattle infected with the disease.
Context
While Sibley makes many valid arguments, and there are important learnings from this work that can inform future controls, it also needs put into context.
The farm in question – Gatcombe Farm – is not typical of NI. It is isolated from other farms, surrounded by houses and roads, so there is little potential for farm-to-farm spread. It also has access to sufficient arable ground to allow slurry to be immediately ploughed in – something not possible in NI.
In NI, since 2013 we have had expert groups tasked with coming up with a plan to eradicate TB. The current group (the TB eradication partnership, TBEP) has put forward a number of measures, some of which will place additional burdens on farmers, but which also include a badger cull in hotspot areas.
We are at a stage now where we have got to trust that these expert groups know what is best for NI farming, rather than delaying any longer to consider other views.
In 2012, former Agriculture Minister Michelle O’Neill announced the five-year Test : Vaccinate : Remove (TVR) research project.
It finished in 2019, and while it might have had some merit, it essentially “kicked the can down the road”. That can’t be allowed to happen again.
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