Bovis Nightmare

Barr, whose farm was hit with M.bovis in 2018, said he recognised early on that he was up against a bureaucratic process very similar to that he had experienced with his involvement with a North Island school board at the time of school closures about 17 years ago – when the strain on the principal ended with him taking his own life.

“This bovis is just like the school closures and it’s a bureaucratic process done poorly through insufficient information and lies,” says Barr.

He says bureaucrats put the blame for their own poor processes onto affected individuals and isolate them.

“Those people feel isolated, blamed, and take it personally…and that’s when people do some silly things and take permanent solutions to temporary problems.”

Barr started the ‘Mbovis Affected Farmers’ group on Facebook to connect with other victims, and support them so they could understand their problems were not with themselves but with the processes they were being put through.

Barr runs three properties, just north of the Rangitata – his dairy farm, a leased block running replacement heifers, and a third block used for a calf rearing business, which was the one hit by the disease, from bought-in calves.

“We were trading a lot of stock, buying calves, rearing them and on-selling them.

"That’s basically how I got bovis, and how I spread it around the country.”

When the diagnosis came, Barr expected it because he had bought from a neighbour who had since gone positive.  

“It was about May 2018 when the nightmare started.”

He had to cull about 550 animals, losing calves, two-year-old beef animals, and two years’ worth of genetic improvement in his replacement calves. 

Barr says the Ministry of Primary Industries’ handling of infected farms initially was “absolutely diabolical”. 

“Then it got worse.”Many frontline staff had little idea about farming, and he says he was asked about the incidence of mastitis in bulls, when steers would be calving, and whether newborn calves had been in contact with cows.

All three of his properties were put under Notices of Direction when he believed there was no need, since no trace stock had been on the dairy block.

“It was just arrogant – no listening, no understanding, everything’s in lockdown.”

Then it came to testing.

“I said okay, what do you want to test? And you’d get someone from Wellington say one thing, your case managers say something else, and the testers turn up and want something else. It’s like, what do you clowns want?”

Barr was speaking in response to a recent increase in the number of confirmed Mycoplasma bovis infections, particularly in Canterbury.

MPI’s official figures show seven active confirmed properties as at November 12 – following a long period during winter when there was only one, week on week.