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Australia

Farmers concerned at potential foot-and-mouth spread as Australia and Indonesia tackle outbreak

Farmers concerned at potential foot-and-mouth spread as Australia and Indonesia tackle outbreak

Nathaniel Rose kept his shoes and sandals separate from his main baggage as he traveled home from Bali to Melbourne last week.

During his 10-day holiday on the Indonesian island, Mr Rose said he was aware of concerns that tourists visiting Bali might bring foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) back to Australia, including via contaminated soil on footwear.

“I did one trip to Mount Batur that could be considered rural. We walked through the village along the dirt track,” he said.

As per Australian government advice, Mr Rose thoroughly cleaned his footwear before he got on the plane.

“There were foot-and-mouth disease signs at Denpasar Airport,” he said.

“When we got off [the plane] there were biosecurity officers and we had to walk on a disinfectant mat.”

a man smiling close up wearing a glasses
Nathaniel Rose took precautions to ensure he did not bring the disease from Indonesia to Australia.(Supplied)

An outbreak of FMD could devastate Australia’s livestock industries, cost the Australian economy around $80 billion, and lead to many animals being slaughtered to control the disease.

Those potential consequences are why the agriculture industry here has been begun on tenterhooks since an outbreak in Indonesia in May, with some calling for a travel ban.

Farmers and authorities in Indonesia are working hard to contain the virus’s spread, while the Australian government this week committed $10 million towards biosecurity measures in Indonesia to tackle the outbreak.

FMD is a highly contagious animal disease that affects all cloven-hoofed animals and is carried in many ways, including by live animals, in meat and dairy products, soil and untreated hides.

It is commonly spread between animals through inhalation, ingestion and contact with infected animals, but is not to humans, including by eating affected meat.

The virus is different to hand, foot and mouth disease common in children.

Local farmers implement strict controls

FMD Greenfields Farm East Java
Greenfields Indonesia own the biggest dairy farm in East Java.(Supplied: greenfieldsdairy.com)

The outbreak in Indonesia is the biggest since 1990 and is estimated to be costing the local economy $200 million per month.

Since May, 479,000 animals have been infected with FMD in Indonesia.

More than 9,000 animals have been killed to try to control the virus’s spread, while another 5,189 have died from the disease.

The province of East Java currently has the highest number of infections, with a mix of farms in that area, including smaller traditional farms and others run by large companies.

East Java’s biggest dairy farm is owned by Greenfields Indonesia, a company established by a group of Australian and Indonesian entrepreneurs.

Map of FMD cases in Indonesia
The provinces in Indonesia with the most foot-and-mouth cases.(ABC News graphic: Jarrod Fankhauser)

The farm, with 16,000 cattle, has implemented strict biosecurity measures, despite no cases of the virus being detected there.

Richard Slaney, from Greenfields Indonesia, said the company’s cattle underwent frequent health checks and were being vaccinated against the disease.

Mr Slaney said there were also strict controls to clean workers’ dirty clothing and footwear, vehicle tires and animal feed.

“No outside visitors are allowed to come [to the property],” I added.

He said vehicles were sprayed from “top to bottom”.

“All vehicles have gone through an additional cleaning process and very strict controls are also applied to the milk tank transport vehicles,” he said.

Small farmers can’t afford vaccines

a man is feeding his cows in a shed
Robi Gustiar says some farmers are having trouble accessing vaccines.(Supplied)

Robi Gustiar is a cattle farmer and the secretary-general of the Indonesian Cattle and Buffalo Breeders Association that represents small farmers who have between five and 30 cattle.

He said smaller farmers were also doing what they could to control the outbreak.

“For farmers who have up to five cattle, they spray disinfectant in locations around cattle pens and on vehicles.”

He said some farmers were still waiting for vaccines from the government, while medium and larger traditional farmers were proposing to purchase vaccines independently to access them faster.

FMD Greenfields Cows East Java
Larger farms, like the Greenfields farm in East Java, have better access to vaccines.(Supplied: greenfieldsdairy.com)

Mr Gustiar said small farmers could not afford vaccines and distribution was not easy.

“Indonesia is an archipelago country, so transportation is a problem. They [need to] make sure the vaccine is still active when it reaches the cattle,” he explained.

Australian government support for Indonesia announced this week included supplying more vaccines to Indonesia as well as protective equipment, training and expertise.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said $4 million of the $10 million dollars allocated was for vaccine purchasing.

“This is on top of support already announced for Indonesia, which included 1 million doses of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine and almost half a million doses of lumpy skin disease vaccine already committed by the Australian government,” he said.

Disaster authority bolsters Indonesia’s response

a man vaccinating a cow in a shed.
Indonesia has procured 3 million vaccine doses to tackle the disease.(Supplied: FAO Eko Prianto)

According to Indonesia’s Foot and Mouth Taskforce, more than 1.2 million doses of vaccine have been administered to animals.

Spokesperson Wiku Adisasmito said he hoped that the outbreak would be under control by the end of the year.

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Categories
Australia

Foot-and-mouth disease led to 6 million slaughtered animals in England 21 years ago. Could it happen in Australia?

A man in a green wet weather jacket stands in front of a herd of black and white cows.

Robert Craig’s memories of foot-and-mouth disease tearing through the north of England are more than 20 years old, but they’re as painful as ever.

“It still makes my hair stand on end now,” the dairy farmer said.

“You don’t realize at the time that things do affect you longer term.”

There has not been an outbreak of the disease in Australia for over a century, but cases detected in Indonesia in May have put authorities on high alert, and farmers fear what could happen if the disease lands in Australia.

Foot-and-mouth spreads rapidly between cloven-hoofed animals including cattle, sheep, pigs and goats. It’s serious and highly contagious.

Warning: This story contains images some readers may find distressing

In February 2001, Robert Craig was raising a young family in Cumbria, which became one of the worst-affected areas during a devastating outbreak of the disease.

It led to the mass slaughter of cows, pigs and sheep.

“I remember being out in the fields, I think spreading fertilizer, and they were rounding up these sheep and lambs and there’s this truck in the gateway,” he told the ABC News Daily podcast.

“Seeing them rounding up newborn lambs and you knew where they were going, that was just hideous. Absolutely hideous.”

Men checking cow carcasses as they are lined up with excavators in the background.
Slaughtered cows in Yorkshire were lined up before they were loaded onto trucks and transported to a burial pit.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Mr Craig said he remembers tracking the spread of the disease on a map and watching as it got closer and closer to his own farm.

“There was a real sense of despair. It was hard for people to see at that time how anything could get back to normality because such a huge number of livestock had been taken,” he said.

Over the course of 11 months, more than 6 million cows, sheep and pigs were slaughtered in an effort to contain the spread of the disease, although only a relatively small portion of that number had the infection.

In total 2,000 cases were ultimately confirmed across the UK.

“I don’t know whether it did any good either. There was a fair bit of panic at the time,” Mr Craig said.

“It was just like, removing as much livestock as possible to try and slow [it] down, to get in front of it because it had gotten so badly out of control.

“I don’t know if they even tested these sheep that were taken away.”

Mr Craig was one of the lucky ones whose animals were spared, but his community suffered badly.

“Pretty much all of our neighbors sort of succumbed to it at some point,” he said.

“The whole of our area was pretty much just dead, like no livestock at all.”

Dead cows being sprayed with disinfectant on a farm.
In 2001, destroyed cattle with foot-and-mouth disease were sprayed with disinfectant to stop the spread.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Australians sent to help

Australian vet Bill Sykes has similar “life-changing” memories of the time.

The Victorian, who had a background in national disease control and animal slaughtering, was sent to Yorkshire, in northern England, as part of an Australian contingent deployed to help.

“It’s 20 years on, there’s a lot of things I don’t remember since five minutes ago, but these things come back, and they haunt,” he told the ABC News Daily podcast.

Mr Sykes recalls how the abattoir workers would try to calmly gain the trust of bobby calves, or calves less than a month old, before the slaughter.

“The strategy was to put his finger in the calf’s mouth so that it would happily suck and while it was sucking, he’d shoot the animal with a captive bolt pistol, and it would drop and then he’d go to the next one .”

But for him, the destruction of newborn lambs via lethal injection was particularly devastating.

“They went limp in your arms, you put them down and you picked up the next one,” he said.

“And I happened to love little lambs. I found that real, real tough.”

Mr Sykes said the immediate impact of the disease in the countryside was stark.

“At the bottom of the valley, everything is normal, sheep and cattle grazing in the paddocks,” he said.

“By the time we get to the top of the valley there’s nothing there, it’s just an eerie silence. It’s a sea of ​​nothing.”

Two men walk towards green hill, lined with empty paddocks.
The “sea of ​​nothing” remained after neighboring Yorkshire farms had been “slaughtered out”.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Australia assesses its preparedness for an outbreak

Bill Sykes, who is also a former regional vet officer in the Victorian Agriculture Department and former Nationals MP, is enraged by reports of Australia’s biosecurity laws being breached.

Foot-and-mouth disease can be carried on meat and animal goods, and in one recent case, a backpacker returned from Indonesia with prohibited meat.

The passenger was fined $2,664 after being detected with undeclared sausage meat and a ham croissant at Darwin airport.

“Just unbelievably dumb. Stupid, thoughtless, call it what you like, but that’s the sort of situation that can occur,” Mr Sykes said.

Foot-and-mouth disease can also spread in air particles between animals situated closely together, through contaminated water and on clothing and footwear.

The risk of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Australia has increased to approximately 12 per cent after the recent spread in Indonesia and its popular tourist island, Bali.

Mr Sykes said vigilance is paramount.

a number of officials in white coats inspecting sick cattle.
Officials from the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture visit a farm in East Java where cattle have foot-and-mouth disease.(Supplied: Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture)

The Australian government has introduced a range of measures to lower the risk of foot-and-mouth disease entering the country.

Biosecurity measures have been ramped up at airports, including installing acidic disinfectant foot mats and increased surveillance on meat products entering the country.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt announced a new task force will also be established to focus on how to best prepare for a potential outbreak.

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Categories
Australia

Could a national livestock gene bank future-proof endangered farm animals?

Photo of a cow.

In 2001, foot-and-mouth disease broke out among livestock in the United Kingdom.

More than 6 million sheep and cattle were slaughtered and their carcasses incinerated on farms before the disease was brought under control.

In the wake of the crisis, estimated to have cost approximately $14 billion, the UK bolstered its national livestock gene bank to bolster rare domestic breeds, including sheep, cattle and goats.

The bank — a type of high-tech Noah’s Ark — securely stores semen and embryos cryogenically frozen as insurance against disasters such as disease, flood, fire or climate change.

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Categories
Australia

Farmers reeling from ‘preventable’ summer bushfires demand inquiry

A man, wearing a blue work shirt, leans on a fence.

It has been six months since a devastating bushfire ripped through WA’s Wheatbelt region, and impacted farmers are still counting the cost.

The Shire of Corrigin, 220 kilometers east of Perth, was among the regions hardest hit.

About 45,000 hectares of land was burned, four homes, and dozens of buildings destroyed, and more than 1,000 livestock perished after a prescribed stubble burn reignited in what authorities labeled “catastrophic conditions”.

One farmer caught in the fire’s path was Steven Bolt, who estimated millions of dollars in losses from the February blaze.

Mr Bolt is deputy chief of Corrigin’s Volunteer Fire Brigade and said the fire, which engulfed his property, could have been prevented.

“We all knew the risk coming that weekend, and for a permit to be issued is absolutely staggering, and the fire should never have happened, and the permit should have never been issued,” he said.

A farm's shed and machinery burns.
A shed burns in Corrigin during the February bushfires.(Twitter: Ashley Jacobs)

The neighboring Shire of Bruce Rock permitted the stubble burn several days before the blaze started on February 6.

An investigation by the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) found the authorized burn-off was reignited in 43-degree temperatures before it spread rapidly in strong winds.

No total fire ban was in place at the time, but Mr Bolt contacted authorities with his concerns.

He said his pleas were ignored.

“I told [them] this was going to happen and now it has, and we need all the resources we can find, particularly air support, because we were never going to stop that fire,” he said.

‘We don’t like coming out here anymore’

Correcting farmers Tim and Shannon Hardingham look at a shed with clouds behind them
Tim and Shannon Hardingham survey the damage on their property.(ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt: Sam McManus)

Tim and Shannon Hardingham run a farm 10km east of Corrigin.

Between paddocks of vibrant yellow canola crops now lies a metal scrap yard.

The Hardinghams said the past six months had been the hardest of their lives, and much of the recovery was still ahead of them.

“People who haven’t been through it have a lot of empathy, but there’s a daily struggle in what to do next because there’s just so much to do,” Ms Hardingham said.

“The single biggest cost that is shocking to us is the asbestos clean-up, which we’ve been quoted around $250,000 to clean up.”

Bushfire damage on the Hardingham's property in Correction
More bushfire destruction on the Hardingham’s Correcting property.(ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt: Sam McManus)

The couple now avoids coming out to the farm and have chosen to keep their kids away.

“It doesn’t even resemble the same farm,” Mr Hardingham said.

Please for answers

The burning permit that led to the fire was issued by the Shire of Bruce Rock, which declined to comment on the issue.

Shire president Stephen Strange said it had been a difficult time for the region, but praised the work of local authorities, volunteers, and the state government.

“The recovery will be ongoing for years and years to come… the farmers themselves have done a good job getting the landscape back into pretty good condition,” he said.

“The communication has been very good between affected landholders, community members, and the shire.”

In a statement, DFES acting deputy commissioner Jon Broomhall said the Bruce Rock Shire was within its rights to grant the burning permit, and an “after-action review is currently underway, focusing on the four bushfires that occurred across the state that day.”

Correcting farmer Steven Bolt with one of his sheds destroyed by bushfire
Mr Bolt with one of his sheds destroyed by bushfire.(ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt: Sam McManus)

But local farmers and firefighters said they had so far been left in the dark.

Mr Bolt was calling for a separate investigation into the Correcting fire.

“This needs to be a standalone inquiry. The issue of the permit being given is different to what occurred in the other fires,” he said.

“We haven’t even come close to being able to discuss the issues that have led to this catastrophe through this area,” he said.

Law firm Hall & Wilcox has been engaged by insurers representing impacted landholders, with inquiries still in the early stages.

Ms Hardingham said a thorough investigation could help prevent similar incidents in the future.

“We don’t find ourselves privy to much information about what went wrong,” she said.

“It would be nice to think it will never happen to anyone again and that people could learn from our loss and what we’ve gone through.”

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Categories
Australia

Foot-and-mouth disease threat prompts Victoria to form emergency animal disease task force

Beef cattle line up under a blue sky

The Victorian government will establish an Emergency Animal Disease (EAD) task force to prepare for an incursion of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), which is currently circulating through parts of Indonesia.

The task force would be co-chaired by Agriculture Victoria chief executive officer Matt Lowe and the Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp, taking advice from Victoria’s Chief Veterinarian Graeme Cooke.

The Australian government has ramped up biosecurity measures to prevent foot-and-mouth and lumpy skin disease entering the country, since it was discovered in Bali, Indonesia a month ago.

Experts fear the exotic livestock diseases could cost the economy billions if it made it into Australia.

“We want to get a focus and targeted government response to a whole range of things we need to put in place in terms of being prepared and to prevent an outbreak,” Victorian Agriculture Minister Gayle Tierney said.

“[The task force] will be looking at things like developing an EAD response plan and will also be looking at access to sufficient personal protective equipment and the supply chain issues that we have in respect to testing, tracing, destruction, disposal and vaccination.”

‘No delay’ in task force formation

Ms Tierney said there had been a “lot of work already underway” that would help mitigate any EAD threats, including coordinating with the national process for service and infrastructure continuity.

a cow, with someone holding its tongue out.
The symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease on the tongue of an Indonesian cow.(Supplied: Dok. Kementan)

“It’s clear that there is anxiety within the farming community, people are wanting to know more and we’ve been able to give very practical advice through webinars,” she said.

“This is a good time [to] have those conversations at a grassroots level that give farmers the opportunity to turn that anxiety into very positive practical measures.

“We have a very clear understanding of what the risks are and what we need to do to ramp things up to ensure our preparedness is the best it could possibly be.”

Three hundred biosecurity staff were being trained through Agriculture Victoria to prepare for an FMD outbreak in the state, learning about scenario planning and emergency exercises.

Ms Tierney said despite Indonesia having FMD present in the country for months, the taskforce was a “rapid response”.

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