Farm Biosecurity When Attending Farm Visits

A great way to share knowledge in the farming world is to visit other farms for meetings and farm walks and tours.  Often arranged by farm advisors, vets, feed companies, discussion groups and indeed farmers themselves, getting on to other people’s farms can be a really useful and informative way of discussing and viewing current farming topics, methods and practices.

HOWEVER, you have a responsibility to that host farmer that you don’t take a variety of undesirable diseases onto his farm.  Your clothes and footwear should be clean and your footwear should be suitable to allow you to disinfect your boots/wellies by dipping into provided clean disinfectant at the farm entrance.  The list of “nasties” that you could potentially spread around is listed below.  Obviously the risks are less if you are not actually directly handling any livestock when on the farm, but even without handling stock, conditions like sheep scab, foot and mouth disease and salmonella amongst others can still be potentially transmitted.

Viruses

• Foot and mouth disease
• Maedi-visna (MV)
• BVD
• Border Disease
• IBR
• Orf

Bacterial

• Salmonella
• Caseous lymphadenitis (CLA)

Other

• Sheep Scab
• Ringworm

ALWAYS REMEMBER visitors themselves are at risk of taking home the host farmer’s bugs unless you remember to dip your feet again when you leave.

Kath Dun, Kath.Dun@sac.co.uk