$20m facial eczema research funding announced
Government and the red meat sector are teaming up to help eradicate the significant impact of facial eczema (FE) on farmed animals.
Even more doubt has been cast on the economic value of drenching ewes with long-acting products, following a recent jointly-funded Beef + Lamb New Zealand study.
The study led by AgResearch’s Dave Leathwick and co-funded by B+LNZ and AgResearch, showed that initial benefits of drenching with these products, especially to low body condition score ewes, were short-lived. It also showed the effectiveness declined in the interval after the treatments had expired. Untreated ewes tended to catch-up to their treated equivalents.
“This has also been seen in other New Zealand studies and highlights the danger of only assessing benefits at the end of the drug’s pay-out period,” Leathwick says.
He explains that many sheep farmers treat their ewes pre-lambing with long-acting drench products (capsules or injections).
“This is in the expectation that both their ewes and lambs will benefit, however, this study shows that any benefits seen at weaning are likely to over-estimate the true value.”
This latest published research builds on previous studies from NZ and overseas, which have shown that animals treated with long-acting drenches have reduced immunity to worms because they are not being exposed to worm antigens every day.
“The sheep’s immune system needs to ‘see’ worms every day in order to function at its best,” Leathwick says.
This means that when the drug delivery ends, the ewes tend be to be less resilient to worms than those that weren’t treated.
“The true benefit is likely to be less than expected,” he adds.
These results follow on from previous studies, which highlighted that for many farmers, pre-lamb drenching may result in a net financial loss rather than gain.
This occurs because the biggest driver of financial return is lamb survival and not extra weight added to ewes or lambs at weaning.
Lamb survival is highly variable between farms and seasons, as well as treated and untreated ewes. “This means farmers would benefit more from focusing their efforts on lamb survival to weaning than worrying about parasites,” Leathwick concludes.
Further trial work and modelling carried out in NZ showed that treating ewes pre-lambing with long-acting products increases the risk of developing drench resistance on the farm.
“For most sheep farms today, it is almost too late because resistance is now extremely common.
“For them it is now a case of farming with resistant worms. One certainty is that drench resistance will not go away if you keep drenching all the time.”
Rural trader PGG Wrightson has revised its operating earnings guidance, saying trading conditions have deteriorated since the last market update in February.
It's been a bumper season for maize and other supplements in the eastern Bay of Plenty.
Leading farmers from around New Zealand connected to share environmental stories and inspiration and build relationships at the Dairy Environment Leaders (DEL) national forum in Wellington last month.
AgriZeroNZ, a joint venture fast-tracking emissions reduction tools for farmers, is pouring $5 million in a biotech company to develop a low emissions farm pasture with increased productivity gains.
Fonterra is teaming up with wealth app provider Sharesies to make it easier for its farmer shareholders to trade co-op shares among themselves.
Te Awamutu dairy farmers Doug, Penny, Josh and Bayley Storey have planted more than 25,000 native trees on the family farm, adding to a generations-old native forest.