My son Philip, and daughter-in-law, Aileen, were having some visitors to their leased farm. I was booked to mind my granddaughter, Katie. We gathered in a field of beautiful red clover. Colm was along too.

A group of Belgian farmers stood around listening to Philip and Aileen. The visit was organised by Animal Health Ireland (AHI) as part of the Europe-wide Sustainable PARasite Control in Grazing Ruminants (SPARC) programme. It is part of Horizon Europe, an EU scientific research initiative aiming to develop a sustainable society.

This includes reducing the use of antibiotics and anthelmintics [medications used to treat parasitic infections] in cattle and sheep. Dr Natascha Meunier, parasite control manager and Eilish Gill, SPARC project officer from AHI, facilitated the discussion. All grazing animals are exposed to parasitic infections that cause damage to the gut and lungs, impacting the welfare of animals. The animals fail to thrive and with severe infestation can lose weight or even die.

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Overuse of anthelmintics results in some parasites becoming immune, rendering the dosing exercise useless. Welfare is the key issue. Nevertheless, worm doses are expensive. The profitability of the farm is impacted by the cost of medications and by the animals’ potential performance being restricted.

The story

Philip and Aileen are passionate about reducing the anthelmintic use in their heifers. This was prompted by a visit to Gillian and Neil O’Sullivan’s farm in Dungarvan when Gillian, who is also a vet, explained her programme. Frustrated with regimental dosing and mixed results, Philip says, “we’ve moved completely away from the old system of dosing every six weeks alternating between white wormers (benzimidazoles) and yellow wormers (levamisoles) to control gut worms, lung worms, liver fluke and rumen fluke.” Aileen says despite the regimental dosing, some animals still showed signs of infection.

Overuse of anthelmintics results in some parasites becoming immune, rendering the dosing exercise useless. Welfare is the key issue

Their aim is to reduce the use of worm doses, to reduce the worm burden in the animals and so allow the heifers to be able to deal with the reduced worm burden naturally. Between them, they explain that, after turnout onto clean pasture, the young dairy calves are weighed every three weeks.

Their starting rule is to dose only the bottom 10%. These are selected using the ICBF programme which focuses on the genetic merit of the animals. Aileen insists that the programme works. She has proved this by concentrating on the daily weight gain and consistent weighing that she knows when an animal needs a dose. Any heifer that is gaining less than .5kg/day is given a dose.

The programme uses various shades of red to monitor the animal’s performance in relation to its genetic target weight. In year two of this strategy, the animals are thriving.

Philip and Aileen are no longer seeing red or even pink flags. They are thrilled with the progress and confident that if a heifer needs a dose, then it is effective for her as the parasites haven’t built up resistance from frequent doses. Heifers are dosed when housed and get no further doses in their second year and beyond unless determined by faecal samples. Monitoring and testing is important. These tests are coming back negative.

Room for improvement

The Belgian farmers said they get the results of faecal samples on the same day. There is still room for improvement here in the Irish system. We definitely need to get results faster and I’m confident we will as more farmers come on board.

By the end of the visit, I had off-loaded Katie to her uncle Colm as my arms were breaking. She was happy out in the middle of it all. This reduction of anthelmintic use on farms is really important for us to be able to continue to farm sustainably.

Well done to AHI for its work. Once again, the science is working.