With farmers here facing a number of years of tissue-testing for bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD), the chair of the National Beef Association (NBA) in NI, Oisin Murnion, has highlighted concerns on whether there are enough safeguards in place to prevent new sources of infection.

In particular, he questions what DAERA will do to prevent imports being brought in which are potentially persistently infected with the disease. “In the past, it was cattle imports into NI that brought us all of these production diseases in the first place. There isn’t much point putting farmers to the expense of tissue tagging calves only to let BVD back in again through the back door,” Murnion told the Irish Farmers Journal.

Current import guidelines on the DAERA website generally focus on the main statutory diseases such as TB, and there is no specific mention of BVD. However, the BVD eradication scheme order for NI, which came into force in 2016, does require that anyone who comes into possession of a bovine animal born after 1 March 2016 and which doesn’t currently have a negative test result, must get it tested within 20 days. That means that breeding animals could in theory be coming into NI without being BVD-tested, although females will be picked up once they give birth.

In the Republic of Ireland, imported cattle born after 1 January 2013 (the date their scheme became compulsory), and without a test result, must be checked for BVD within 20 days. But with the Republic of Ireland being the source of the majority of cattle imports on to farms in NI (9,293 head in the 11 months to November 2016), and given that it has completed four years of compulsory testing, presumably most of these imported animals into NI are certified BVD-free.

In the same period to November 2016, a total of 1,462 head were imported on to local farms from Britain, with a further 497 coming in from other countries.