Foot-and-mouth disease travel risk and simple biosecurity tips | Ep. 130

Before someone steps onto your farm after travelling overseas, what do you ask them?

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) isn’t in New Zealand, and we all want to keep it that way. But with outbreaks overseas and more people travelling or visiting farms, now is a good time to check your visitor process is clear and easy to follow.

In this episode, Fi Roberts, DairyNZ head of biosecurity, and Mitch Cooper, DairyNZ senior technical and policy advisor and dairy vet, discuss FMD readiness, travel-related risk, and the practical steps you can take to help protect your herd, your people and your business.

Find out more:

• Foot and mouth disease | DairyNZ
• Visitor biosecurity management | DairyNZ
• Overseas travel - risk assessment. A biosecurity risk assessment that covers visiting overseas farms, what to consider before returning to New Zealand, and what to do on arrival. 
• Biosecurity resources and tools | DairyNZ

Have feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at talkingdairy@dairynz.co.nz

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Stay up to date with advice, latest research, tools and resources. Read, browse, scroll, listen, or be there in person. Visit dairynz.co.nz/get-connected 

Transcript

Introduction

Speaker 2 0:01

Kia ora and welcome to Talking Dairy. I'm Jac McGowan. Before someone steps onto your farm after traveling overseas, what do you ask them? It's a simple but important question right now. With the All Blacks heading to South Africa and with a foot and mouth disease outbreak happening there, overseas travel and farm biosecurity are front of mind for many of us. New Zealand doesn't have foot and mouth disease, and we want to keep it that way. So today we're talking about foot and mouth disease readiness, why it matters, what's being done behind the scenes to get ready, and what you can do now to help protect your animals and your business. August is biosecurity month, so it's a good time to check the basics. And joining me are two people right at the centre of this work, Fi Roberts and Mitch Cooper. They've got useful insights to share, along with some simple things you can do now to reduce risk on your farm. Kia ora Fi and Mitch, great to have you with us. Great to be here. Great to be here, Jac. We've had you both on before, but let's start with quick intros. Who are you? What's your role?

Speaker 1 1:06

What do you do? So my name is Fi Roberts. I'm head of biosecurity at DairyNZ. I've been in this role around two and a half, nearly three years now, and I come from a UK dairy farming background. And originally in 2002, I was working during the FMD response in the UK, which has sort of struck a passion for this work.

Speaker 2 1:27

So some unfortunate skin in this game.

Speaker 1:36

I was a clinical dairy vet just over a decade in the Waikato before moving into a role where I inform a lot of our biosecurity materials and policy.

The Real Cost Of FMD

Speaker 2 1:47

New Zealand doesn't have foot and mouth disease. But why is it something that we need to keep on our radar?

Speaker 1 1:53

Yeah, 100%. It does not have foot and mouth disease, and we never have had foot and mouth disease in New Zealand, and that's exactly why it's worth keeping it on our radar. It's a disease that travels extremely quickly between cloven-hooved animals, and that includes cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, and goats. An outbreak in New Zealand is going to trigger an immediate halt to international trade markets, which is going to affect dairy, meat, and other primary sector exports. The economic impact's going to be huge, right? So consequences would be felt right across rural communities and the wider economy. We've done a little bit of impact assessments in terms of the economic impact assessment. Some work suggests that it could cost up to $3 billion to actually eradicate FMD. The readiness work we're doing is going to significantly bring that cost down. That's the plan. But also in terms of our export values, the estimate is that it could be up to $14 billion per year until we can, you know, get back to trade. So either way, huge economic consequence. The main thing that we want to do is again, prevention is cheaper than dealing with the outbreak after it arrives. So doing all this readiness work will bring down that cost to eradicate the disease. But we also want to get on top of it quickly. I think that's the main thing that we need to do in the event of FMD, is because if we're prepared, if we can jump into action quickly, we can continue to trade, hopefully. We're trying to get those settings right so that that trade could continue, particularly in the dairy sector. Ultimately, good biosecurity is like insurance. You hope you never need it, but you're glad that it's there when you do.

What FMD Looks Like On Farm

Speaker 2 3:33

All right, Mitch, if foot and mouth disease arrived on a dairy farm tomorrow, what would farmers actually see and what would it mean for their animals and their team and their business?

Speaker 3:44

A couple of levels there. So if you had it in your animals, it's quite a nasty disease. Foot and mouth disease is named quite accurately because the primary lesions are in the feet and uh on the hooves. And so what you normally see is vesicles or blisters that rupture in sort of several areas of the mouth and feet between the toes and along the edge between where the wall meets the hoof wall meets the skin. Really painful. Those lesions cause cows to not want to eat for quite extended periods of time, they become severely lame. You can get lesions in other places on the teeth and other areas which can cause sort of chronic issues. It's really infectious. So you normally see a hundred percent of a herd with some level of clinical signs, and normally one to five percent of those animals will die from it. And even the animals that survive, a lot of them end up with sort of pretty significant long-term consequences, and they often end up becoming viral carriers sort of long-term. So pretty nasty disease and really, really infectious. If we get it in New Zealand, there's some fairly significant implications. You know, I won't, I guess, go into the real nitty-gritty of the disease response because some of those decisions will be made at the time, although lots of those decisions are pre-made, but the general impact is that there will be a national livestock movement standstill, which halts the movement of all livestock for potentially quite a long time. Could be sort of four weeks or more, depending on how things are tracking at the time. So sort of fairly significant impacts on the ability to just farm in a normal way. Because it's so contagious, there'll be sort of fairly significant lockdown areas and roadblocks and lots of things put in place to stop the spread from happening. And so it does have quite a major impact on the ability to farm it just in a normal way. It's important to know that these clinical signs aren't always foot and mouth disease. It's really key that if farmers do see some of these clinical signs that they should reach out to their vet or call the exotic disease hotline and get things checked out. Obviously, given that we haven't had foot and mouth disease, it's probably not going to be. And there are a few things that look like it in a few diseases that exist in New Zealand, but it's really important to make sure you get things checked.

FMD Versus Mycoplasma Bovis

Speaker 2 6:03

Lots of farmers will be familiar with Mbovis and fortunately have probably no experience with foot and mouth disease. How do the two differ in terms of what a farmer sees in terms of infectiousness and management?

Speaker 6:17

Yeah, Mbovis is a bit of a different beast because it's sort of an underlying, grumbling, chronic health issue that impacts production more. So you don't often see, you know, really sick cows and is certainly much less infective. You know, foot and mouth disease can be spread through all sorts of secretions. It's sort of airborne spread. Mbovis is a little bit harder to spread and it's sort of mostly through milk or sort of direct nose-to-nose contact. So the sort of scale of severity is quite different, but a lot of the management options might be the same. So you see whole herd depopulation, you'll see lots of sort of casing and tracing of case farms and probably just a plug to make sure your Nate records are always up to date and as accurate as you can get them. Because at the time of an outbreak, one of the biggest things we need to be able to do is really, really good farm-to-farm traceability, and that starts with Nate.

Travel Risk And Border Defences

Speaker 2 7:11

South Africa has been dealing with uh foot and mouth outbreaks, and you know that all blacks are going on tour there. So a few of us will be thinking about travel, not me, but some lucky ones for people traveling to South Africa or who are um who have people coming back from there. How concerned should they be about that foot and mouth outbreak?

Speaker 7:32

South Africa have been battling with FMD since 2019. It is uh widespread throughout the country in sort of all areas where the all blacks are playing tests pretty much. So it is quite a challenging um disease from South Africa's perspective. They obviously have a very different scenario to us. We're surrounded by water and we have very easy to control our borders. They don't quite have those luxuries and very different farming systems, very different economies. And so it has essentially become endemic in multiple parts of the country, which means they are, you know, whilst they are trying to make progress towards getting rid of it, for now they're living with it to a degree and sort of making slow progress towards eradication. The important thing to remember is that yes, South Africa has foot and mouth disease, but the risk of you coming into contact with infected animals is still pretty low, particularly if you're not going out on farms or you're not going on sort of any wildlife tours, which obviously a lot of people want to do in South Africa, and that's fine. But you know, the risk of you sort of coming into direct contact with infected animals is still really low. Doesn't mean you should treat the risk as zero. Important thing is the majority of the risk to New Zealand is handled by a really good border biosecurity. There's lots of things that happen at the border that take as much risk away as possible, but there are things you can do to lessen the burden at the border and reduce the risk of the country. You know, you need to make sure that you are not bringing back clothing or footwear that's covered in dirt or, you know, has been in contact with animals, that should all be sort of hot washed before you even step foot into the country. Also, good to know that it's not just South Africa that has F and D and has a risk. There's plenty of countries in the world that sort of are ongoing F and D problems and so travel to lots of parts of the world comes with some degree of risk. You can mitigate a lot of the risk yourself just by being sensible about what you are bringing back into New Zealand or what you're trying to bring back into New Zealand and a reflection that the bulk of the risk coming in is, well, a legally imported product, but B a virus on people's clothing and footwear.

Speaker 1 9:36

Interestingly, I had a farmer that called me about they'd been on holiday in Bali, but they transited through Australia and they were concerned that there weren't enough protections at the border. It was largely because they had transited through Australia, which has very strong biosecurity protection measures as well. And when they came back in through New Zealand because of the border being a kind of a risk-based approach, there were less measures because they'd come from that that border protection from Australia. So I thought that was quite interesting.

Speaker 2 10:03

So a little bit of personal responsibility there as well to bear in mind where you've come from.

Visitor Rules And Farm Zones

Speaker 2 10:10

Mitch, if someone has recently been overseas and and they want to come on farm, what are the main things you should consider before they come through the gate?

Speaker 10:18

First plug, I guess, for DNZ resources is that DNZ has a good visitor policy resource that you could refer to if you're sort of trying to figure out how you want to design your visitor policy. Both DNZ and MPI recommendations, particularly when you're coming from F and D countries, but all countries that, you know, if you're sort of applying a good standard of practice is to stay away from farms for a week after arrival into the country. Obviously, that's quite challenging for farm workers and farmers who are coming back into the country to stay away from animals. So that's where a lot of your risk management comes from before you even step foot into the country. That's where you're careful about your clothing, you're careful about your footwear. People can't get FMD, but they can very briefly carry it in their nasal passages and on themselves. So, you know, there is a tiny element of risk here. One of the upsides, I guess, of New Zealand being where it is, is for the most part, we're a pretty long flight from anywhere. So were you to be in a very temporary carrier state, you're probably out of that state by the time you reach New Zealand. But having some gap between entering to the country and stepping foot on a farm is ideal, and seven days would be the you know the perfect recommendation. It's ideal to sort of apply different types of zones to your farm, particularly if you've got people coming onto your farm that aren't necessarily your farm workers that need to have access to every bit of your farm. If they're just visitors and there are scenarios where you can keep them to just the tanker loop or just the shed when the animals aren't in there, or you know, sort of assigning like red, orange, green zones of your farm and sort of as part of your normal visitor policy saying, well, these people can come here and maybe I need to ask some questions about people coming onto my farm before I'm letting them particularly into direct contact with my animals. And making sure that, you know, people aren't coming onto your farm with muddy footwear and and grubby clothes and you know, sort of sensible general biosecurity practices that should apply day to day, you know, even irrespective of FMD.

National Readiness And Cost Sharing

Speaker 2 12:14

And if foot and mouth disease did arrive tomorrow, what work has already been done to help the sector respond?

Speaker 1 12:21

So there's been a pretty significant milestone in the last 12 months, Jack. So it was at field days last year that six of the industry sector groups signed an operational agreement with MPI with the Crown. And what this basically does is create this framework, which means that we will prepare together, respond together. But it's essentially we will have joint decision making over anything that happens in the readiness space and the response space, and also joint cost sharing. And Dari and Z worked really hard to negotiate a strong cost share proposition for farmers, and we got a really good deal. And so the work now has switched from that negotiation into delivery, and DariNZ is chairing it actually. Campbell Parker, our chief executive, is the chair of the foot and mouth disease council, who's basically accountable and responsible for national preparedness for foot and mouth disease. We've done our first year of work in the readiness space, and the council prioritized a significant amount of investment into different areas that were considered to be the most significant gaps. You know, we can never be a hundred percent prepared, and so there's always work to be done. But the important thing about having industry in the tent is that we get to decide what's key and critical from our perspective or from farmers' perspective. So some of the work that we've been doing in the last year, it was called readiness foundations that were sort of in place, and a couple of those things include laboratory diagnostic supplies and maintaining an FMD vaccine bank. Those things have always been in place, but now that the industry is involved under the agreement, we get a say in um getting the best deal for those suppliers, getting the best deal for the vaccine bank, and having a say around the costs and so on to make sure that the deal is efficient as possible. In terms of the other work, it's sort of about strengthening capability, making a practical difference in a response. So we've undertaken a review of the four key operational plans that will be used in the event of an FMD response, and that's around cleaning and disinfection, destruction protocols, movement control, that sort of thing. And that's thrown up a number of gaps, some of which we've known about for some time. But the council's role now is to really prioritize what we work on first. That work's been undertaken already. We are also doing a big project around workforce planning. And we want to make sure that the industry folk are well and truly embedded in any response. At the end of the day, they're the best ones to support farmers through a crisis and also ensure that we can bolster the workforce that MPI will bring to the table. We're doing a significant piece of work around the compensation settings. So this is essentially, you know, the compensation arrangements that we had for Mbovis will look a little bit different during FMD just purely because of the scale of the outbreak. And we need to make sure that we get cash into farmers' pocket early, that they're well supported, and that there's clarity around those compensation settings. The other thing we continuously work on is making sure that we've got pre-prepared comms, that we're ready to go in the event of an outbreak, and that those communications are aligned across industry and government. Darian Zed is investing on farmers' behalf that levy funding into the FMD Council work plan. And this year and the total work plan was around 2.1 million. So from those seven signatories to the OA, 2.1 million for this year, and we'll probably be looking to up that to about 3 million as delivery matures next year. Particular focus for us in that work program has just been to stay on top of the practical farmer outcomes. So, you know, making sure that we build on what we learnt during BOVIS, making sure that these operational plans are going to work in the real world and in real time with real people. So that's where our focus goes when we are co-delivering those bits of work and making sure that farmers are supported through it.

Vaccine Bank And Vaccination Strategy

Speaker 2 16:29

You mentioned Vaccine Bank. I read that South Africa are using vaccination as one of their tools for dealing with the outbreak. Can you tell us more about that vaccine?

Speaker 16:39

So the vaccine bank is something that we've had in place for a long time already, but is something where the contract with that bank comes up for a renewal every so often. So we're sort of in the middle of the process of looking at renewing that contract and deciding how best to make sure that we're getting maximum value for money. As Fee said before, you know, DRNZ now being an official signatory to an OA and having a say in that has meant that we've been closer to this than we've ever been before. What the vaccine bank gives us is, I guess, we sort of pre-agree there's lots of strains of foot and mouth disease out there. And the vaccination against one strain doesn't necessarily cross-protect against other strains. There's a little bit of cross-protection here and there. The strains out there in the world shift as time goes by. So we're seeing a little bit more exposure to certain strains right now in certain parts of the world that we didn't see five or ten years ago. So it's important that the vaccines in the bank that we have shift as global disease shifts. And so we have a number of these antigens banked right now, and we're looking at a new bank coming up soon that has a slight change in those antigens, so that we are as sort of maximally prepared when if we decide to use vaccination as a tool to help manage an outbreak, it's not a guarantee that we will use vaccination. Certain changes to the World Organization for Animal Health guidance around how you manage F and D, who are sort of, I guess, the organization that dictates whether or not we can trade to a degree in the event of an F and D and what countries look to as sort of guidance for how countries are responding. Certain changes to that in the last couple of years mean that vaccination is way more on the table than it ever used to be. Used to be that it was much harder, it would take a longer time to declare freedom if you use vaccines, but that barrier has sort of been removed. So if we do decide to use vaccines, we've got a vaccine bank. That means our time from sort of talking to the bank and saying, hey guys, we need some vaccine, we've stereotyped it, we know it's this strain, we need some vaccine made up for this, where you can basically get access to a whole pile of doses very quickly. If we didn't have a vaccine bank, the amount of time it would take us to approach a vaccine manufacturer and get vaccine into New Zealand would be months. And we're sort of cutting that down to weeks by having a vaccine bank. So the ability to use that and use that rapidly is really, really critical. What that does is it sort of just helps to prevent the spread. It does a really good job at preventing clinical illness and it does a really good job at sort of reducing transmission. It doesn't prevent transmission, but it sort of can reduce transmission. And foot and mouth disease animals are very, very high virus producers. They're absolutely dumping out virus constantly from their systems. And vaccinated animals, that is a much, much smaller issue. So it stops the spread much more effectively than no vaccine would. But one of the issues is that the vaccine only works for a relatively short period of time. The immunity degrades pretty rapidly within a couple of months. So we need to sort of make sure, you know, A, we're using it and we're keeping on top of it, but we might need to keep using it for a wee while depending on how New Zealand's eradication strategy goes. In the perfect world, it sort of just buys us a little bit more time to get on top of things quicker and easier and stop the spread from happening from a central point.

Speaker 2 20:03

So definitely buying us time rather than making the problem go away.

Speaker 20:08

It buys us a, I guess, a tool for disease eradication that we wouldn't otherwise have if we didn't have a vaccine bank. And, you know, the more tools we have available to us, the better we're able to respond.

Exercise FarmGate And The Human Toll

Speaker 2 20:19

Now, Mitch, you were part of Exercise Farm Gate, which looked at what a foot and mouth disease response could look like on a real farm. What stood out to you from that day?

Speaker 20:30

Yeah, so just for a bit of context, Exercise FarmGate was a field exercise in the beautiful Tatanaki where I live, where they simulated the first 72 hours of a response on a case farm. Basically a drill. And the intent of that was A, to practice it, but B to get all of the relevant parties along and see what actually happens in F and D response and see, you know, just there's a huge amount of decision making that needs to happen on a farm when you do find FMD or when you suspect a case of FMD. And that is really, really important for people to understand and see what that looks like in practice. So yeah, they essentially compacted, you know, the first 72 hours down into a day, what it would look like for the initial investigating veterinarians to come onto the farm, what that process looks like to, you know, get samples, get them back to the lab, to call a farm positive, to go through effectively the operational plans that Fee touched on, you know, the movement control, the destruction plan, the disposal plan, the cleaning and disinfection plan, all of those, you know, there are quite a number of decisions that need to be made at quite pace in the initial disease response. And it's really, really important that we practice those now and then to make sure that everyone who's involved in those decisions is well in the know, understands exactly what's happening in those operational plans, which as FESAID are sort of constantly being improved, and allows us to make sensible decisions. That minimize the impact on the country and the economy and the farmer and maximise our ability to respond to that disease outbreak.

Speaker 2 22:10

Mitch, that sounds like a bit of a role play. Did people get into those roles on the day?

Speaker 22:16

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the people involved in the day itself were the people who will be in those roles or in teams that will be involved in those roles in the event of an FND outbreak. So for them it is a little bit of practice. One of the things I should mention is that there's a lot of I guess focus on disease management and and the sort of practical side of things. But one big thing that really was a huge focus in that exercise was also how to support the farmer. Because I think it's easy to forget that yes, F and D is an economically devastating issue and you know for our economy and and the the bigger picture, but at an individual farm level, it's a massive devastation to that farmer. It's a huge emotional toll, compensation is there, so hopefully it's not a significant financial toll, but there are a lot of really challenging human aspects to foot and mouse disease. You know, you start sort of putting movement controls on farms all around the country as well, and it makes lots of sort of day-to-day farming practices really, really difficult. And so, you know, it's important that alongside the disease management aspect of things like we practice in these exercises, it's really important to make sure that we focus on the people involved as well and not just the farmers. You know, some of the people making the decisions, you know, they're having to make really, really hard, really bold, really significant decisions. And so making sure that they are supported as well through that process is really important. Alongside the exercise farm gate, there's actually quite a number of exercises that are going on at the moment for foot and mouth disease in the background. Lots of them MPI driven, some of them are FD council driven. So over the past sort of six to twelve months, there have been a, I guess, a tour going around the country where they've been doing regional workshops and trying to get as many people involved in who might be impacted or who might be on the ground at the time in regional workshops so that MPI can understand who's involved. They can try and get an idea of what they might be missing in certain regions or what information might be able to add to their sort of overall preparedness for managing the disease. It's also been a really good exercise. I tend to do the Tatanaki one, just in informing people who might be sort of loosely related to farming or sort of off to the side a little bit as to just the implications that might be having in their communities. You know, even people like rural bankers will obviously be playing a pretty big role in trying to sort of make sure that people's cash flow is working and that they can survive day to day. So there's a big national tour of those exercises, which is fed into a lot of our understanding of F and D management at a regional level, which has been really, really good. There are also several other large-scale sort of government exercises that are going on in the background, as well as F and D governance exercise, which is, I guess, a practice run through some of the decisions that need to be made by FMD governance, and that's obviously all the industry partners and MPI in conjunction to make sure that we're not making these decisions for the first time or we're not thinking about these decisions for the first time in the event of an FND outbreak, because it'll be pretty chaotic, but there are lots of things that we can do to prepare in advance.

Making Plans Work For Real Farms

Speaker 2 25:29

Fee, when DairyNZ contributes to national readiness planning like this, what do we want decision makers to understand about how dairy farms and farm businesses actually work?

Speaker 1 25:42

At the end of the day, DairyNZ, we know farm systems, right? We know the farming business, we know the industry networks, we know how the sector operates. And so we are that translation piece from those plans into real life. We also have a big role, as Mitch said, we're running these exercises around governance. We are gonna be around that decision-making table. And so DairyNZ's gonna bring its heft to those discussions and be able to drive good decisions that are gonna work for farmers. We have lots of other different areas where we will have a role. You know, there will be a technical advisory group into that decision making, and Dairy and Z will have expertise, or the dairy sector will have expertise that they can put into that. We also have army of foot soldiers, essentially, people that know farmers and know their communities, live in their communities, and they're the ones that we can make sure that they're embedded into that response structure, make sure that they are there to help support farmers, as Mitch said, to a really, really traumatic time. And that's something that Darian Z did really well in MPOVIS. And you'll probably recall the DBCAT system, which was the dairy beef compensation action team, I think. And they were there as a conduit between MPI and between farmers to make sure that farmers got the compensation they were due in the event of an outbreak. We would also help decision makers think about that human side of a response. So if FMD ever arrived here, farmers are not just kind of implementing the instructions. They are, as Mitch said, living through one of the most stressful times that they may ever face. And so, you know, for Darien's had to have your back and to be by your side during that time is going to really help under the pressure.

Simple Biosecurity Checks Right Now

Speaker 2 27:29

Mitch, it's biosecurity month. So let's wrap it up with what are a few simple checks farmers could do now to make sure their farm gate biosecurity is up to scratch.

Speaker 27:41

General rule of thumb that we say is if you can prepare yourself for FMD, you can pretty much prepare yourself for anything. You obviously don't need to live life, you know, necessarily like FMD is here, but there's lots of things that you can do to make your life a little bit easier on the day-to-day. And, you know, a lot of the biosecurity practices that we recommend are useful for sort of generic endemic disease management as well. You know, part of managing things like BVD can be done through really, really good biosecurity practices. So, you know, put a plan in place. If you don't have an official biosecurity plan, it's a really good time to think about putting one in place. We've got guidance and some resources on the DNZ website, or you can ask Daisy on the DairyNZ website to find those resources to just go through and sort of check, you know, have I got this, this, this, have I thought about this, this, and this? A lot of people think about biosecurity as just animals, but it's equipment, it's vehicles, it's people. There are many, many aspects to sort of on-farm biosecurity that you can do to sort of just help reduce your risk on a day-to-day basis. They're not often significant things. You know, we're not talking about sort of life-altering massive changes to your farming practices. They can often just be relatively simple, straightforward activities that you can do day to day to sort of generally improve your on-farm biosecurity. A couple of quick examples. As I said, BVD, you know, one of the biggest things that we would see when I was in clinical practice when people would get BVD on their farms is it's come in from somewhere. It's not necessarily been harboured on the farm and all of a sudden it's got into the milking herd and you've found it. It has usually come in from somewhere, whether that's a neighbouring farm or whether that, you know, is an animal that's been bought in that hasn't been tested and vaccinated. So, you know, relatively simplistic things. Lots of pests and weeds come in from feed. I think people sort of underestimate the level of biosecurity risk that feed can sometimes come with. So it's really important to have a plan in place for things like feed to make sure that you know they're coming from weed-free areas and it's being checked before it arrives on your farm or it's being checked before it's fed out to your cows. So that again, fairly simplistic things that you can do on a day-to-day basis just to reduce your risk.

Speaker 2 29:58

Thank you, Mitch, and thank you, Fee. The big takeaway is, for farmers at least, it's about doing the basics well. New Zealand doesn't have foot and mouth disease, and we really want to keep it that way. With several active outbreaks globally right now, and plenty of us traveling or hosting visitors from overseas, it's a really good time to think about biosecurity. The risk of foot and mouth disease reaching New Zealand remains low, but it's worth making sure the basics are in place. Because foot and mouth disease readiness isn't just about what happens at the border or in Wellington. Farmgate biosecurity matters too. So this Biosecurity Awareness Month, take a few minutes to check the simple things. Know who's coming onto your farm, ask about recent overseas travel, and have a plan for managing visitors, vehicles, equipment, and feed, and make sure everyone on farm knows what good biosecurity looks like. We'll link to our handy biosecurity resources in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time. Matewa.

Episode Summary

Speaker 2 31:04

If you'd like to get connected with DariNZ's latest advice, research, tools, and resources, whether it's reading, scrolling, listening, or in person, you can visit dairynz.co.nz forward slash get connected, and don't forget to hit follow to keep up to date with our latest episodes. As always, if you have any feedback on this podcast or have some ideas for future topics or guests, please email us at talkingdairy at dairynz.co.nz. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time on Talking Dairy.