Flock health club engagement helps stamp out lameness

“We’ve always tried to be proactive, but since we set up our flock health club in November 2016 we really are now encouraging better engagement between local sheep producers and ourselves,” says vet Anna Davies.

"The initiative is helping everyone involved spot key issues before they could become a real problem. This is because membership of the club includes two farm visits a year and a written health plan, which complies with both supermarket and farm assurance protocols."

Club member sheep farmers – 16 of them currently – also benefit from services such as coccidiosis and external parasite testing, abortion screenings and half price post mortems. The membership subscription also covers four faecal egg counts per year. “We are really trying to raise awareness of the issue of worm resistance to the available wormers,” Ms Davies adds.

However, Ms Davies and her colleague Sarah-Jayne Lawlor, both say that lameness is often the health issue uppermost in sheep farmers’ minds when they join the club.

“A lot of local farmers have been particularly concerned about lameness incidence in their flocks, and through the health club meetings we have encouraged them to get the cause of the lameness diagnosed properly. Once we know what we are dealing with – and invariably it is footrot – we discuss use of the sheep lameness reduction five-point plan, and how vaccination as part of this industry-proven protocol can reduce lameness dramatically – certainly when footrot is the primary cause of the problem,” Ms Lawlor says.

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Newtown farmer Elwyn Williams has recently been working with Ms Lawlor to implement all elements of the five-point sheep lameness reduction plan. The goal is to stamp out lameness once and for all on his upland sheep unit.

As one of the first members of the Hafren Vets’ flock health club, Mr Williams of Plassau Farm, Kerry near Newtown, has benefitted from the extra resources on offer through the club. A closer working relationship with Ms Lawlor too has also allowed footrot to be diagnosed as the primary cause of increasing lameness issues in his flock.

Mr Williams runs a flock of 600 Welsh mules cross Suffolks or Texels and also has 100 cattle on the farm with suckler cows calving in the spring and autumn. He starts lambing at the end of February and carries on through April. He sells his first 300 lambs straight off the ewes in the last week of May at Bishop’s Castle market, and can take a load every week at peak time. He expects to have all lambs away by Christmas.

“We normally scan at around 200 per cent and I’m relieved to say the final lambing percentage is pretty close to that. Thankfully, we seem to have any abortion issues well under control simply because we already vaccinate against enzootic abortion and toxoplasmosis. In the past, we’ve had problems with clostridial diseases and pasteurellosis, but now we vaccinate both the ewes and the lambs against these diseases as well, and consequently don’t have any problems with issues such as pulpy kidney anymore. We are certainly strong believers in flock health planning and preventative medicine, but our main problem last year was lameness,” Mr Williams says.

Mr Williams had been implementing a few of the management practices set out in the five-point plan, but despite this was still seeing the number of lame ewes rising year on year.

“We do try to focus on prevention with problems such as lameness too, but our approach wasn’t really working. We footbath the sheep in zinc sulphate and then leave them on hard standing; we frequently move our lick buckets to prevent bacterial infection pressure building in certain areas; and quarantine all new ewes for a month whilst we get them up-to-date on vaccinations, but still we had around 8% of the flock suffering from lameness,” he says.

“Since being part of the flock health club, Sarah-Jayne has become more involved with the flock and diagnosed footrot as the main problem. As a result, she encouraged us to start vaccinating the flock to get on top of it. She’s even convinced us to stop trimming their feet as that can do more harm than good, opening up the underlying tissue to more bacteria and spreading it through the flock on the trimmer blades. We’re also looking into liming gateways as well.”

Mr Williams vaccinated the flock for the first time in the first week of December last year, and then again in the first week of January to complete the primary course before bringing the ewes in for lambing. Lambing indoors can cause a significant rise in the number of ewes suffering footrot, as the warm and moist bedding is an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, slowly increasing the infection pressure moving towards the end of the housing period.

“Since vaccination, lameness incidence has decreased, but the flock is still having a six-monthly booster (July/August 2017) to boost immunity to footrot even further and really get on top of the issue. Thereafter, Sarah-Jayne says we may only have to boost previously vaccinated ewes annually. I see vaccination as in investment in future disease prevention and don’t think you can afford not to. In my experience vaccination really pays back handsomely over time,” he adds.

Mr Williams admits that culling is the next step: “We are going to start culling repeat offenders within the flock, which means we will be fully compliant with all five steps of the sheep lameness reduction plan. It’s difficult because we already cull ewes with bad teeth, mastitis and fertility issues, but I don’t think we will get to our target of less than 2% lameness incidence annually unless we start culling those that are routinely suffering from footrot.”