At this time of year, I benchmark my farming business. There is no point in doing this unless it makes me take a long hard look at everything I am doing.

I go through all my income and expenditure to see if I am as competitive as I possibly can be. On the income side of things, it forces me to consider whether I can get some more money for the things I sell.

But this year in particular I have looked long and hard at where all my money goes, and one thing that has stood out is the amount of money that I give to the vet.

Taking a closer look at my veterinary expenses, I discovered that I am spending £2,200 on vaccinations alone.

I vaccinate all the cows and replacement heifers for BVD, lepto and salmonella. Then I vaccinate the spring-born calves for salmonella, pneumonia and IBR. However, the autumn-born calves get no vaccinations at all.

BVD is one that should have been dealt with long ago but, because some farmers refuse to get rid of the persistently infected animals, and no one forces them too, it’s still a substantial risk and one I’m not prepared to drop yet.

The lepto is another that I wonder about, but a lot of the farmers who I sell heifers to like them vaccinated for that disease.

It’s not that expensive so I’ll probably stick with it for now.

The real big one is the salmonella. I had problems with salmonella in my calves a few years ago and I lost a lot of calves. It also seriously affected the performance of the rest of the calves that year.

I have had to think long and hard about this one. Do I try and save money and take a chance? But if I have another outbreak of salmonella, I will be losing money instead of saving it. When you start vaccinating for something, it’s hard to stop. I think I’ll have to stick with this one too.

Then we have the pneumonia and IBR. I have only been using these two vaccines on the spring calves for the last two years. They have worked superbly well, and I have had no respiratory problems since.

My autumn-born calves were not vaccinated for pneumonia or IBR and I have had a lot of coughing and high temperatures. Treatment for these was Recocam and Zuprevo, which works into about £7/head, and if you get the vet out it will be £40 plus. Then you have the loss of thrive, which is an added cost as well.

I am not going to stop vaccinating for pneumonia and IBR, but I am going to add my autumn-born calves to the vaccination programme.

So there you go, I have gone through my vaccinations to see if I could reduce this cost, and ended up adding in some more.

Blackleg and scour

All this, and I have not even considered blackleg vaccination or scour. I have never vaccinated for blackleg, but I do wonder if I should start.

We used to vaccinate for scour, but stopped about 20 years ago. At the time, we improved our hygiene and increased the amount of straw we were using, and it seems to be working still. I will try to get away without scour vaccine for now.

Back to the figures, and the £2,200 we spend on vaccines. It works out at £22 per calf reared on the farm so that puts the cost into context. A couple of dead calves and some sick animals would soon add up to far more than that.

Also, we are all busy, and it seems more sensible to try to prevent livestock from getting sick then trying to cure them when things go wrong.

I’m sure that there are lots of farmers getting away with using less vaccines than I am, and that’s great. Everyone should assess their own situation regularly and decide the best approach, but not forgetting the cost of the treatment and the loss in performance in an outbreak of disease.