Craig Hickman is an equity manager on a 1000-cow dairy farm in mid-Canterbury.
OPINION: There is no question that a disease outbreak is bad for business. Just ask the New Zealand tourism industry and any number of hospitality providers, many of whom lost their livelihoods due to the ongoing Covid pandemic.
A disease outbreak is also extremely expensive. New Zealand taxpayers have spent $350 million so far in an attempt to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis from their shores.
Add to that the extreme stress and mental anguish felt be everyone affected by these outbreaks and one lesson becomes abundantly clear; it’s far better to keep disease out of the country than it is to deal with it once it arrives.
We haven’t managed to do that with monkeypox, but I certainly hope for all of our sakes we can do it with foot and mouth disease.
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I have become increasingly cautious when it comes to disease on-farm. I recently received a phone call from a fellow farmer who couldn’t bring his heifers home from grazing due to suspected M. bovis. One of the heifers had calved, but the calf had died, and he had no way to milk her. He wanted to buy a couple of calves to suckle off the new mother and give her some relief.
Obviously I wasn’t going to take money from someone in that situation, but nor was I going to let them on the farm, so I left the calves in a trailer at the gate for him to collect such was my paranoia.
A possible foot and mouth outbreak has the makings of a perfect storm for New Zealand, says Craig Hickman.
From a purely financial perspective, farmers came through the Covid-enforced closure of our borders relatively unscathed. The global pandemic boosted commodity prices to the point that dairy farmers enjoyed a record payout.
Even now sustained demand for our products combined with a low New Zealand dollar are shielding us from the full brunt of high inflation and skyrocketing input costs.
Some commentators were quick to point out that it was agriculture’s export receipts that kept New Zealand solvent while our borders were closed, and ironically it could be the reopening of those same borders which could see those receipts dry up and plunge us into a recession the likes of which we have never seen before.
Foot and mouth disease (FMD), which causes severe lameness and death in cloven-hoof animals, has made its way to China, Indonesia and now Malaysia. More concerning, infected cattle have been wandering in and out of tourist areas in the holiday hotspot of Bali.
The Balinese walk their cattle during the day to graze, so there are countless opportunities for tourists to come across discharge from cattle shedding the virus, if not the cattle themselves.
No one quite knows the possible impact a foot and mouth outbreak could have on our economy. In recent days the Ministry for Primary Industries and agri commentators have suggested it could be anywhere from $10 billion to $15b.
Australian officials have put the cost of the disease reaching their shores much higher. It is unknown what the longer-term impact would be as it would possibly take decades to rebuild the industry.
On a personal basis it is hard to quite comprehend the impact. On my farm I would have to kill around 1250 animals. I would have to lay off five full times workers and I would no longer pay all the local businesses that support the farm. The vet, grazier, engineer, mechanic and many others would lose a large source of income.
With the entire herd slaughtered there would be no milk income, around $4 million this season based on a $9.50 per kgMS milk price, and no way to pay the mortgage. The only asset of value would be the land but as the countryside would be covered in farms where farmers have simply lost the ability to earn a living, the value would be dramatically diminished if a buyer could be found.
A possible outbreak has the makings of a perfect storm for New Zealand. It’s the busiest time of year for many farmers, border staff are suddenly busy again with international flights after an extended quiet period, and the Government is distracted by various crises including the ongoing Covid, M. bovis and monkeypox outbreaks.
It’s a storm that would be very difficult to weather. In 2001 the United Kingdom suffered an outbreak of FMD caused by pigs being fed swill that not been heart sterilised.
Eleven months later, with funeral pyres burning endlessly throughout, over six million sheep and cattle had been killed at an estimated cost of $13b. Farmers were not the only ones to suffer, with tourism being severely impacted as well.
Last week the Australian government announced tough new precautions and funding to keep the disease out as they estimate an outbreak would cost their economy $80b.
Every passenger arriving in Australia from Indonesia is now being risk profiled, they have increased the number of biosecurity staff at airports and mail centres and are providing support to Indonesia to reduce the scale of the outbreak.
For the sake of our economy, I hope our government makes the same commitment as the Australian Minister of Agriculture and pledge to doing everything they can to keep the disease out.
If not, the battle to eradicate M. bovis will seem like a cheap game of tiddlywinks in comparison to fighting foot and mouth.
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