Veterinary Enterprises Group

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CHALLENGE, INNOVATE, PERFORM AND EXCEL

Home | Farm Animals | SporeMAP

Is facial eczema costing you money?

Is your current preventive programme working?

Over the past few seasons facial eczema has been a major cost to many sheep and dairy farms.

VetEnt investigations have highlighted several factors associated with facial eczema outbreaks:

Unaware of the facial eczema challenge

Starting the preventive programmes too early or ending them too early.

Not knowing the level of challenge on different parts of the farm.

Unaware that animals are affected

The obvious skin lesions are only the tip of the iceberg. Only a small proportion of the animals develop skin lesions which appear about 2 weeks after the challenge.

The real cost of facial eczema is associated with the liver damage which can have a significant impact on milk production, cow live weight, dairy heifer growth rates, ewe mating performance and lamb growth rates even when there are no signs of skin lesions.

Cows not getting enough zinc

Under dosing due to under-estimating cow liveweights, inaccurate mixing and dosing, using low quality zinc products.

Mycotak not being used correctly

Mycotak must be applied with Mycowet onto pastures that are green and growing and have spore counts less than 15-20,000.

SporeMAP can help!

It’s a programme to help you Monitor what’s happening on your own farm, Analyse what’s happening on your farm and Plan for effective prevention.

Find out and understand what’s happening on your farm

District Monitor Programmes

A more effective way to give you an idea when you should start doing your own spore counts to know what’s really happening on your farm

Each clinic has been broken down into districts each with a monitor farm.

Pasture spore counts are done from several parts of each monitor farm every 2 weeks. Our SporeMAP clients are told each time the report for their district have been updated. Spore count trends are available in the website and in each clinic.

Farm Monitor programmes

We will warn you when the spore count trends indicate the risk is high enough to start doing your own monitoring.

We will get you set up to do it with protocols for taking pasture samples, do the spore counts for you and help you analyse the results and plan for prevention.

Understand the disease better

Our philosophy is “the more our clients understand their risks, the more successful their risk management”.

An integral part of SporeMAP is to help you understand what is a very complex disease. Some of our knowledge has come from our own research and investigations which often contradicts quite a few very old, established myths about facial eczema and its management.

SporeMAP for dairy cows & replacement heifers

Is your prevention programme going to work in a real challenge?

1st farm visit

Discuss your current prevention programme

Check zinc levels and liver damage in your cows

2nd farm visit (Follow up based on results from 1^st farm visit)

Measure & check zinc dosing systems

The outcomes of these investigations will be used to implement an effective risk management programme.

SporeMAP for sheep

Planning for prevention

Applying fungicides

Selling susceptible animals

Grazing “safer” pastures

Zinc treatments

What’s happening in your animals?

Our research suggests a trigger point when liver damage is likely to affect ewe mating performance and tolerance to facial eczema varies widely between flocks. We can use blood test to get an indication of the tolerance status of your flock which will help to provide a cost benefit analysis for whole flock treatment with zinc capsules.