The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) in England, along with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has secured £1.4m of funding from DEFRA to look at the effectiveness and potential to scale-up badger vaccination to help control bovine TB.

The three-year project is being led by farmers in Cornwall, where a previous small-scale study between ZSL and the Cornwall Wildlife Trust found the number of badgers testing positive for TB fell from 16% to 0% after 4 years of vaccinations.

The new project will look at three different approaches, including annual vaccination of badgers, vaccination every other year and a reactive policy, where badger vaccination is done in an area following an outbreak of TB in cattle.

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Cornish farmer and NFU member Martin Howlett is taking part in the project. He said his farm was repeatedly hit by TB over a 15-year period, but it has been TB free over the last five, thanks in part, to wildlife control (culling of badgers).

“I’m hoping this project will deliver the evidence we currently don’t have – that badger vaccination can be delivered at a much bigger scale across the country and help farmers in the fight against bovine TB,” he said.

Last August, the UK government announced plans to end badger culling in England by 2029. In the last decade over 230,000 badgers have been culled. Over a similar period, annual herd incidence (a measure of the number of new TB breakdown herds) has fallen from around 10% to 7.6%.