Practice diary

摘要

A new year and hopefully a better one for livestock farmers, but I am not so confident. The current major hassles continue to be high feed prices and the fact that our practice is slap in the middle of the bluetongue surveillance zone. Life is slightly easier now that we are in an officially 'vector-free' period - although midges are buzzing around. Clients are taking advantage of the possibility of shifting animals and booking stock in for blood sampling at a considerable rate. On the pig front, performance levels are up on most farms. Herd fertility currently seems very good, although most units seemed to suffer with summer infertility to varying degrees, so there is likely to be a shortage of pigs coming forward - although with slaughter pigs still being 'rolled' week on week, the impact of this may not be as apparent as expected. Several herds are seeing a significant benefit from the recent introduction of circovirus vaccines. In all cases so far, there is very positive feedback, and there islikely to be much greater uptake of these vaccines as farmers talk amongst themselves - heaven forbid that they should take the vets' advice!