The last of the factory hoggets were sold recently. The price has got a lift as the balance of power in the marketplace has swung back in the favour of the farmer. There doesn’t seem to have been as big a carryover of hoggets as last year – mainly, it seems, due to the excellent thrive achieved by lambs last back end due to the good weather. Hopefully, this will bode well for the guys producing early lamb in that the processors won’t have a ready supply of cheap hoggets to control the market.

Another factor that may be helping the situation is that Chinese demand for lamb is increasing, which means less New Zealand lamb is ending up in the EU this year. Hopefully this trend will continue.

I got a call last week from a suckler farmer who has just found himself in an unenviable situation. His call followed a rant I had a few weeks back about the insanity of the decision made by a small number of farmers to hold on to BVD positive calves. He was one of these farmers. This guy is by no means a messer either – he is achieving great results from a grass-based system producing top quality weanlings.

Positive result

Hopefully, by sharing his story, it will convince others in a similar position of the knock-on effects involved in retaining Persistently Infected (PI) calves. This farmer had the foresight to enter the scheme voluntarily in 2012 and had a clean sheet that year. In 2013, he was confident that all would be fine but two calves – a bull and a heifer – showed up as PIs. He re-tested both of them along with their dams and despite them looking healthy, the second test came back with the same positive result. Their dams luckily came back negative which was a relief.

The farmer separated both of these calves from the rest of the herd, thinking that this would suffice. Although confirmed PIs, the two calves looked healthy and they surprised him as they continued to thrive as well, if not better, than normal.

Last backend, he decided to slaughter them by which time the bull and heifer had reached liveweights of 480kg and 380kg, respectively. Not bad, he thought, as they covered the cost of keeping their cow for the year and they were now gone off the farm. Job done, or so he thought. Well it was job done, indeed, as he found out to his horror this spring when he started submitting BVD samples for this year’s crop of calves. Approximately 50% of the results were positive.

Now, the positives still have to be tested a second time to confirm that they aren’t just transiently infected. Needless to say, this farmer is under a lot of stress, worrying about the final outcome. Even if they pass the second time, there is still some source of infection lurking that needs to be isolated and removed before it causes any more PIs.

He is also baffled as to how the infection entered the farm. It is hard to comprehend how infectious this disease is. Something as simple as coming home from the mart or a farm walk with dirty wellies that have come in contact with the virus is enough to bring the infection into your farm. He said that the breeding pattern was messy last year, which might suggest that there was something circulating in the herd during the bulling period. This also has a real cost to profitability on suckler farms that farmers often fail to take into account. The moral of the story? A stitch in time saves nine. If you have calves that are PIs, remove them.