One of the themes of farming in Orkney is turning a disadvantage into an advantage. When Orkney Livestock Association (a not-for-profit, farmer-led health scheme) first launched in 2001, it was with this in mind.

Following on from the BSE crisis of the early 2000s, morale and prices were low among the farmers of Orkney. Rather than wait for outside assistance, a group of farmers decided to do something proactive to improve the saleability of the island’s cattle.

That is where Karen Tait came in, manager of the OLA office at Orkney Mart, she has been with the company from day one.

“After I finished up work in the mart I was approached to become involved with OLA. The farmers involved set up a steering group and it was my job to implement the actions they wanted to take,” she explains.

BVD free

Ambitiously, the group’s first goal was to eradicate BVD from the island of Orkney.

“When the group carried out that initial survey, it found half of farms either had BVD or had been recently exposed to it. Obviously, that was something that was very worrying and was having a major effect on the island,” Karen says.

Over 15 years on from the launch of that initial BVD eradication scheme, only now is Orkney about to see the true benefit. There have been no positive reactors identified on the islands in the last 12 months and this leaves Orkney close to achieving a BVD-free status.

Karen hopes this will be official by June. “We hosted our first BVD-free sale of cattle all the way back in 2002, so to get to where we are now is quite satisfying. Initially, people thought it would be easy to do because Orkney is an island, but the problem is it’s wall-to-wall cattle and that just creates the perfect breeding ground for BVD to spread.”

The sale that Karen mentions was one of the first real signs of progress for the group in its overall aim of improving Orkney livestock farming. Cattle in the sale had to be of a known BVD practice and vaccinated against the disease, which enticed buyers to the ring as they knew what standard of stock they were buying.

The scheme was heavily backed both by local farmers and the local authority. Funding was provided by the council to cover the costs of BVD screening tests for three years, between 2002 and 2004 and then again in 2009, this time for Johne’s Disease.

Targeting Johne’s

With the scheme tackling BVD progressing well, the group set its sights on addressing another common disease among suckler cows, Johne’s Disease. Karen recalls a time when cull cow sales commonly saw affected animals pass through the ring: “They were quite obvious, bottle-jaw, thin and of low quality, but now that is extremely rare.”

So far, the island’s farmers have halved the incidence of Johne’s from two in every 100 to one in every 100. Now clinical cases are few and far between, emphasis is on tackling subclinical ones, which Karen says are far more complicated to deal with than BVD.