THE online survey was carried out in June by Cattle Health Certification Standards ( CHeCS ) which sets standards for infectious disease control and quality assures UK cattle health schemes . It set out to understand how vets and advisers use the schemes and what their key health and welfare priorities are . Eighty-four percent of the respondents were vets with the remainder livestock or animal medicines advisers .

Despite giving participants a free text option to identify any challenge they wanted , more than a third 36 % ( 87 ) specified ‘ lameness ’ as the industry ’ s

biggest health and welfare issue . The next most common responses from 13 % ( 31 ) of participants concerned infectious diseases , of which around

half specified ‘ TB ’. A range of economic pressures producing low margins which prevented reinvestment in welfare was third , identified by 9 % ( 22 ).

When also asked about the biggest challenge related to farm profitability that cattle farmers and vets face , answers concerning low market prices and / or high input costs were most common ( 21 %), followed by competition caused by Brexit and trade issues ( 20 %), then infectious disease ( 19 %).

Lameness and infectious disease are problems we can and must take the opportunity to address as they have a knock-on effect in terms of both profitability and reputation .

“ In the question about challenges to profitability , infectious disease ranked

third and most of the answers specified BVD , Johne ’ s Disease or Neospora , all of which we can either reduce the impact of or eliminate completely .”

In the survey , 85 % of participants rated the effectiveness of cattle health schemes at reducing or eliminating infectious disease as ‘ good ’ or ‘ very good ’, with 87 % giving the appropriateness of measures required under CHeCS the same approval .

More than 80 % of those asked about whether identifying biosecurity measures which reduced risk of TB , then rewarding farmers for using them was a good idea , believed it was .