The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) today (Thursday, January 30) said that farmers want to know when “compulsory tissue tag testing is coming to an end” in relation to the Bovine Viral Diarrhea (BVD) eradication programme.
ICMSA dairy committee chair, Noel Murphy, has called on Animal Health Ireland (AHI) to seek answers from the new Minister for Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and the Marine, Martin Heydon, on funding for the “seemingly never-ending” BVD Eradication Programme.
He said members of the BVD implementation group contacted Minister Heydon’s predecessor following an adjourned meeting last October to advise that it was “time for some hard questions and straight answers around the funding for a programme that is ongoing for nearly 12 years”.
Murphy said although funding was allocated in Budget 2025 for animal health including BVD, the ICMSA dairy committee chair believes it is now time for Minister Heydon “to publicly tell farmers where all this is going and what the end result will look like”.
“It is likely that 2025 will see AHI seek freedom from BVD status but even assuming that that is applied for and granted, we are still apparently going to be looking at a further two-year monitoring phase post 2025.”
According to Murphy the key question is who will continue to pay for the programme?
He said ICMSA members are expressing “extreme unwillingness after a decade of paying out” to continue.
“Farmers have ordered their tags for 2025, but we are no further on regarding an answer from the minister.
“Assuming that this seemingly never-ending programme is finally being wound down, we have to reject any more demands for farmers’ money,” Murphy added.
According to the ICMSA dairy committee chair the organisation is” happy to acknowledge that the BVD programme had delivered with the number of PIs down to 0.02% of all calves tested in 2024″.
However he also said that the programme had gone on far too long and “farmer patience – and willingness to subsidise the effort – were now at an end”.
Farmers
Murphy said he believed not everyone understands that that “farmers are no longer willing to finance these endless programmes and just keep on kicking-in to open-ended campaigns”.
“The current TB figures stand as a damning indictment of this old strategy and farmers have had enough.
“AHI need to make a commitment as to when compulsory testing is going to end. Most farmers entered the scheme on a voluntary basis in 2012 on the basis of a three-year programme, 13 years later we are still BVD testing,” he outlined.
According to Murphy farmers have “had enough” and now want to see a timeframe that maps out “the ending of tissue-testing and the financing of a winding-down or post-2025 monitoring period”.
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