The news that France issued a temporary closure of its borders for cattle exports last weekend as a result of outbreaks of lumpy skin disease (LSD) will have come as a concern to Irish farmers as the threat of the spread of new vector-borne diseases becomes higher across Europe.

France has been battling the spread of LSD for the last number of months, and the fact that some of the spread is being attributed to illegal animal movements has created problems for the French authorities.

The decision will add extra work for Irish exporters exporting weanlings to Italy, but it is not thought it will jeopardise their movement to one of Ireland’s high-priced markets.

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The short-term nature of the movement ban is not likely to cause any great upswing in prices for Irish cattle, as Italian buyers are likely to wait for the French market to reopen rather than switch suppliers for a few days.

Increasing global temperatures means that the threat of these vector-borne diseases will likely become higher in the future.

Changing weather patterns and warmer winters in particular mean that the midges that spread the disease are active earlier and later in the year, and this may allow the midges over-winter during mild winters.

When we talk about the potential fallout from a bluetongue outbreak in Ireland, we tend to focus on the implications of a ban on livestock exports. The potential damage that a ban on live exports could do to the Irish cattle industry would be huge.

Being bluetongue-free means that we are currently capitalising on outbreaks in other countries.

This has driven the demand for Irish weanlings and is part of the reason why Irish weanlings are currently trading €1,000/head higher than last year. What we don’t often talk about is the devastating consequences an outbreak could have at individual farm level.

Huge problems

High mortality, low performance and low fertility have caused huge problems on affected farms across Europe. All stakeholders must be mindful of the potential impacts that a disease like bluetongue could have, and we must do all in our power to keep new diseases like bluetongue out of the country.

Next week’s meeting of exporters, AHI and other stakeholders is an important one and should not turn into another talking shop where plans are put on hold and no meaningful action takes place.

It’s disappointing that the Department of Agriculture is not attending that meeting. We have talked for years about a potential IBR eradication programme but yet haven’t made any real progress on rolling it out.

Meanwhile, other European countries have grasped this nettle and implemented successful eradication programmes.

Funding will be an issue and it will be critical to get Department of Agriculture support for any action. Getting buy-in from farmers around any actions is an even bigger challenge, and lessons must be learned from the BVD eradication programme.

It’s up to AHI to provide the evidence for the rollout of any planned vaccination programme in relation to other actions around weanling health.

It’s important that any programme involves all stakeholders, including vets and marts, to make sure that everybody is on the same page when it comes to changing practices.

As an island nation we have a great opportunity to have one of the healthiest cattle herds in Europe, but that means working together to keep potential diseases from coming to our shores and more importantly, working harder at eradicating the diseases that we currently have.

This isn’t easy and will require some tough decisions to be made along the way, but it’s in all of our interests to make sure that animal health and a healthy national herd remains everyone’s top priority.

We’ve seen in the past how top-down diktats don’t work in relation to making changes happen on farm, so it’s important that everybody buys in across the industry on the importance of animal health.