News

At the Welsh Dairy Event in Carmarthen, we have learned of a "new" antibiotic available to our vets from a company in Belgium. Albiotic has a claim for Staph Aureus.

It is important that we as an industry respect this technology by using it prudently as opposed to excessively.

Pruex can help. Our on farm culture package allows farmers to identify which bacteria is causing an infection. Typically within 24 hours, a bacterial infection can be identified. A sample of milk is taken by the farmer from an infected quarter. This is plated, incubated for 24 hours and the results analysed. If the "bug" is Staph Aureus, your vet can advise you if you should use this new antibiotic to treat.

The plate shows Staph Aureus bacteria. Farmers can use the book that comes with the pack to identify the "bug". 

At the Welsh Dairy event in Carmarthen October 24th 2017, Pruex founder Aled Rhys Davies will be discussing water quality and its influence  on the health of young calves.

"Often, as farmers we concentrate on adaptive immunity, colostrum quality, and vaccinations whilst forgetting the role of inert immunity" Says Aled. "The bacterial environment and content of early rations which include water sources are instrumental in the young calves defence mechanisms, often for the rest of their lives."

If you use borehole water, and have slime in your water pipes, then a visit to Pruex at the show could help you keep your calves healthy.

December the 7^th, at the Royal Bath & West Showground, Aled Rhys Davies, Managing Director of Pruex Ltd will be one of the speakers at the innovation for agriculture dairy cow antibiotic reduction conference. So, he’ll need to get out of his overalls, stop his farm visits, forget his lab coat and his laboratory work and concentrate on the dissemination of what he has learned since the completion of his Nuffield Farming Scholarship on Alternatives to Antibiotics in Agriculture.

When asked about the challenges farm animals face, Aled commented, “At the start of my Nuffield study, I had very little recollection of the difference between innate and adaptive immunity. That was probably a good thing as I found myself asking some pretty basic questions to some pretty impressive people. The result being a truly balanced, non commercially biased impression as to what agriculture needs to do to reduce stress in the form of bacterial loading on our farmed animals.”

Pruex works with farmers to develop evidence as to where bacterial infections occur in their animals. “Once farmers know why they need to change some practices on their farms, they are brilliant at working out how to do so. Pruex helps them decide on how to limit infection pressure”, claims Aled.

To avoid financial penalties from elevated Somatic Cell Counts in milk, farmers will often hold milk from problem cows back from the bulk tank. Whilst a short term fix, this strategy certainly doesn’t get at the heart of the problem. At the conference, Aled will offer some practical alternatives that farmers can use to prevent the infection of cows udders in the first place. “Contamination of milk by sick cows is a problem that will only escalate unless we start the process of fixing now. To do so, farmers need evidence of what needs changing to prevent sick cows. Attending the conference would be a good place to start,” said Aled.

Further details including booking forms are available from the organisers 

You no longer have to feel helpless in the fight against infections that arise in young cattle triggered by stressful weaning. In Canada, a simple nose tag has been developed to reduce weaning stress. The calf is fitted with a Quiet Wean nose tag. It prevents it from suckling, but it still has the comfort of it's mothers company. Around a week later, the tag is removed as the calf is weaned. They seem to cope with loosing their mother far better. They don't loose mother and milk on the same day. The video below explains the science.

I’m Aled Rhys Davies, the Managing Director of Pruex Ltd, and today am delighted to be cooking breakfast using a very special type of bacon. The Spoilt Pig brand is the first I know of, distributed by retailers, to claim the status of “Reared without Antibiotics”. The pigs used are kept to a high welfare standard with the aim of preventing infections and illness, so that the need to treat sick animals with antibiotics if the infection is bacterial is negated. Any animal that is treated with antibiotics at any stage of its life is marketed under a different brand. The Spoilt Pig brand therefore offers consumers choice in their purchases.

Within the United Kingdom, if an animal is sick as a result of a bacterial infection, then from a welfare and often a legal point of view, it is rightly treated with an antibiotic to stop it from suffering. The food chain is safe from Antibiotic residues due to strict testing protocols and withdrawal periods for antibiotic treated meat.

Todays fare includes, pork sausages, a fried egg, fried bread and tomatoes. Whilst the sausages might be from animals treated with antibiotics, I’m happy to eat them, as there won’t be antibiotic residues in them nor the egg to cause me any trouble. There is more chance of contracting infective bacteria, resistant or not to antibiotics, from raw meat than from cooked.

The reason I’m delighted to use the Spoilt Pig brand is that it’s a tangible start in the process of communicating to consumers the great work done in agriculture to limit Anti Microbial Resistance. The farms that supply pigs for other brands also work hard to ensure that their animals are not infected by disease causing bacteria. They go to great lengths to ensure the water their animals drink is clean of infective bacteria, their animals are well sheltered outside, or are housed in clean, spacious, well ventilated accommodation, and dedicate a large amount of time and effort towards ensuring their animals remain healthy. There is no chance of securing financial prosperity whilst farming sick animals. Agriculture as an industry needs to build on the example set by the Spoilt Pig brand, and look to further communicate good practice in husbandry and hygiene to consumers. Pruex look forward to helping in the process.

A note to Consumers:

• Giving sick animals that are infected with disease causing bacteria an antibiotic is good. It constitutes Prudent as opposed to Excessive antibiotic use. It is Pruex.
• Giving sick animals that are infected with a virus an antibiotic in not good. It is not Prudent use. It is not Pruex.
• To limit Anti Microbial Resistance, that is, bacteria that are resistant to our medicines and cleaners, we all have to do our bit. We are all in this together, rich, poor, young, old, weak, strong, animals, humans.

Action for consumers:

• If you have a sore throat, don't insist on an antibiotic from your doctor. He or she might inform you that your infection is caused by a virus. If they say it's bacterial, then use the antibiotic they prescribe. You will be Pruex.

Somatic Cell Counts per ml of milk indicate an immune response to an infection. Yet the inside of the udder is supposed to be a sterile environment. So, does a cow with 50,000 cells per ml of milk really have a low cell count? Should we be striving for zero cell counts per ml?
Work done by Pruex shows that cows teats maintain a high level of mastitis causing bacteria on their surfaces throughout the milking process regardless of teat preparation protocol or wether or not the cows are milked by robot, parlour, or if the apparatus have a back flush system or not. The teats pre preparation for milking are not clean of infective bacteria even though they have had a chemical disinfectant applied post the previous milking. Mastitis causing bacteria are present on the teats when the process of milking takes place, when the teat is surrounded by nice warm milk. The ultimate result is the need for antibiotics to treat the resulting clinical cases of mastitis.

Pruex work with farmers to evaluate the level of potential for infection their teat cleaning protocols produce. By knowing where in the process the cows are getting infected, farmers can use evidence to form prudent as opposed to excessive antibiotic use strategies for their cows. In other words, they can work out the best way to limit the risk of infection by bacteria of their cows' udders during the process of milking.
All too often we assume that the cows teats are clean because we use disinfectant teat dips or sprays. If you want to check this assumption out on your farm, please contact us. Info@pruex.co.uk

During evening milking in a Sussex herringbone parlour, I realised the true value of good health. I was there to collect some milk samples direct from the cows’ udders prior to any potential contamination from the milking equipment. These samples would enable the identification by on-farm culturing of the bacteria that was causing mastitis on that unit. With one broken, and a second damaged finger on my dominant right hand, I became totally reliant on the cooperation of the milking staff for collection of the samples I needed. I asked myself the question, do dairy farmers buy cattle crushes to protect themselves from being hurt by handling cattle or is there another reason?

I could imagine a beef farmer with large numbers of nearly feral cattle, wild, un-handled and at best extremely temperamental generating the need for some pretty heavy duty handling equipment. In years past, only the youngstock needed regular handling, with the administration of medicinal treatments of adult cattle being a single occurrence probably causing a headache for the stockman one day per annum. TB testing however changes everything by, depending on the severity of the problem in the area, necessitating the regular handling of adult cattle, youngstock and calves several times a year.

Delving into the issue, I was shocked to find the sheer scale of the expense that goes into the process of TB testing.  I heard of scenarios where, on dairy farms that were having to test several times a year, up to five men were required for eight hours to enable the vet to TB test 600 cattle.  Who will pay for this extremity of service post Brexit? I haven’t had an answer yet.

When you consider that a mower, a piece of equipment a farmer uses probably two or three days a year, costs between £8,000 and £12,000, a hydraulic powered squeeze crush with neck stretching head gate that enables efficient handling of cattle seems like a bargain if it cuts the number of people needed for TB testing, or drastically cuts the time taken to conduct the testing process.

I spoke to Edward and Catriona Penty of American Squeeze Crush Systems Ltd. Since 2004 they have been importing Pearson squeeze crush from America, and, having adapted its design to suit the needs of European and specifically the United Kingdom farmer went on to design and produce their own hydraulic squeeze crush, the “Raging Bull” product range that includes a neck stretching head gate. This crush is claimed to optimize the time needed for TB testing to the limiting factor, namely the speed of the vet. What is more impressive in my opinion is the way the crush cuts the amount of labour needed.

The comments from customers make impressive reading.  They claim that they can do several hundred with one person delivering cattle as quick as the vet can work. A big statement, I understood how this can be achievable as soon as I saw the design. It’s a wide crush. Viewing it with empathy for cows, it looks safe enough to travel through. What I like is that the head gate moves inwards behind the animals’ peripheral vision. Catching a wild beast charging through is easy, it’s the timid beast that won’t push through that take time and staff effort to engage for testing. The hydraulic head gate pulls them in. No waste of time, hollering, taunting, pushing or forcing cattle, just a calm extension of hydraulic pressure delivering cattle quietly, easily and in the right position for testing.

One comment in particular made me laugh. A farmer grazing 850 extremely free range Angus cattle on sand dunes and marshland stated that he had TB tested them all within six hours and the only thing the crush couldn’t do was pour him a cold beer at the end of the day. That is asking a lot. Nearly as much as we did at home as I was growing up, expecting to stay safe whilst trying to dose Charolais cattle between a gate and the hedge. You live and learn!

Since conducting a Nuffield Farming Scholarship looking at "Alternatives to Antibiotics in  Agriculture" I've come to realise that fields are more than a source of forage for livestock. They are a maternity ward, a crèche, a toilet, a restaurant, a pharmacy and a bed. The balance of these variables can affect output. If we maintain stocking rates that pollute grazing with faeces then the value of feed intake is compromised. We expect our animals to maintain a high degree of health whilst at pasture and spend a considerable amount of hard earned cash purchasing and administering animal health products to maintain a level of acceptable output from our livestock assets. We however are often the cause of the need for these products. Our husbandry can upset the balance resulting in sick animals.
We concentrate nutrients out of balance. We graze animals on crops of red clover, we supplement their feed with fodder beet and high polyunsaturated fat content rye grass silage or out winter on kale and then wonder why our cows hold on to their afterbirth. These crops contain goitrogens that inhibit iodine uptake by the thyroid gland. Getting iodine into these cows to address the balance can be done in many ways. Feeding kelp seems to be a great way of doing so. There are other ways, but we need to know that a balance must be achieved to maintain healthy animals.

Stocking rate increases have also upset the balance of our maternity wards. Intensification and increased numbers of animals per hectare has seen us as farmers calving, lambing, farrowing and hatching indoors, or under increased pressure in dedicated paddocks outside. As a result, animals such as calves land on surfaces infested by a cocktail of some pretty infective bacteria. A soup of wet muck covered over by a thin layer of supposedly clean straw. Their umbilical cords would not be subjected to such infestation in the wild. Yes, there would probably be e.coli pasteurella, klebsiella and other infective bacteria in a natural field environment, but these would be out numbered by non-infective bacteria. From the moment these calves injest colostrum, it take three days for their adaptive immunity to develop. This is the type of defence that protects them from bacterial infections. In my discussions with dairy farmers, I've learned that calf scour is considered normal. They have the same number of calving pens for four hundred cows as they did when they had one hundred.

Another variable out of balance is the amount of work done on farm compared to the financial returns achieved. We seem, as an industry, to be busy increasing the numbers of animals we keep with less and less staff and for less return per unit of production. The big stress escalator being the dreaded occurrence of disease outbreak.
One of the big things I learned on my Nuffield was that the health of the young animal determines it's lifetime production output. Sick smolt salmon never grow as well when they get to the sea cages, piglets that scour struggle to finish with the rest of the batch, sick lambs struggle to survive. The animal health products we buy such as antibiotics limit the effect of an infection. It seem to me that we need to start working on limiting the infection from taking hold in the first place. To do so, we have to generate evidence as to what we have out of balance.

And exactly what does a clean calving pen look like?

During and since completing my Nuffield study entitled “Alternatives to Antibiotics in Agriculture”, I identified that husbandry practices on livestock farms, ruminant and monogastric, increase stress and infective bacterial challenge on livestock without farmers realising so. I found that farmers, when they can see and understand a problem, are very good at fixing those issues. They are not so good when it comes to problems they can’t see or understand. Farmers don’t see dead animals as a result of antibiotic resistance; they see dead or sick animals due to, for example, E.coli infections.

In my attempt to understand the effect of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) within agriculture, I struggled to understand:

• Why broiler chicken farmers in Australia, America and Canada got equal or better feed conversion ratio’s and less mortality than we do in the United Kingdom (UK), even though they only clean and disinfect their sheds once a year, whilst we clean and disinfect after every crop, every 39 to 43 days? They would place a new crop of chicks onto the previous crops’ dirty litter. We would place new chicks in clean disinfected freshly littered sheds.
• Why pigs farrowing in old, at first sight dirty, farrowing buildings had healthy piglets, whilst brand new setups where piglets are born into almost sterile conditions had mortality rates of up to 25%?
• Why dairy cows are susceptible to mastitis infections whilst beef cows aren’t?
• Why lambs born inside, in clean and disinfected sheds get infections and scour whilst lambs born outside in muddy fields don’t?
• Why calves born in nice warm disinfected sheds with clean bedding get bacterial infections that cause scour whilst those that calve outside in the rain, wind and on muddy grass don’t.

By studying both diagnostic tools for agricultural use and types of bacterial infections of livestock, I realised that AMR in agriculture is as much of an issue in terms of Biocides as Antibiotics. In other words, bacteria have developed strategies to cope with disinfectant use on farm to as well as antibiotic use. As farmers we seem to be unaware of this scenario.

Animals don’t live in sterile conditions; neither should we keep them in conditions conducive to bacterial infections. There is an assumption within agriculture that when we use disinfectants, we reduce the bacterial challenge our animals face. But, this is an assumption that is NOT based on evidence. My Nuffield study led me to the conclusion that if we are to develop strategies on farm that allow for prudent use of antibiotics, then we have to generate evidence of what bugs are actually causing the infective issues we are trying to resolve. Not all bacteria that cause infections in our animals can be treated with antibiotics. I was amazed to find that of the fifteen common mastitis causing micro-organisms’ in dairy cows, only four can be treated effectively by antibiotics. When our dairy farmers detect clinical mastitis, the first call to action is often to treat the animal with an antibiotic.  If the bacteria causing the infection can’t be destroyed by the said antibiotic anyway, the farmer is wasting time and money and increases the risk of AMR by treating.

The assumption that surfaces are clean post disinfection needs challenging. What I have found, based on evidence generated on farm, is that, post disinfection; concentrations of disease causing bacterial colonies have intensified and proliferated on the surfaces that come into contact with our livestock and farmers / farm workers. So, for example, piglets in disinfected farrowing buildings are being born onto surfaces where there are concentrations of disease causing bacteria three days before the immunoglobulins in the sows colostrum can build an antibody mediated immune defence within the piglet to fight bacterial infections. This happens either because bacterial colonies present on the surfaces have become resistant to the disinfectant, or, due to biofilms protecting these bacteria from the disinfectant. New born calves, lambs, chicks, even smolt fish all face the same fate when surfaces become dominated by disease causing bacteria. The need for antibiotic treatment is fuelled by the disease causing bacterial infections that take hold prior to the formation of the animals antibody mediated immune defence.

By using on farm diagnostic tools, farmers are able to develop strategies based on them being able to visualise the root cause of their infection problems. They can see which bacteria are infecting their animals. They can decide, quickly, based on veterinary protocol, if they should treat the animal with an antibiotic or not based on evidence. They can make an informed decision, based on evidence, as to the efficacy of their hygiene protocols in reducing the bacterial loading and hence stress on their animals. Farmers however don’t tend to be microbiologists. They need simple tools to enable them to generate the information they need to limit bacterial infection stress on their animals.

Note:

Image1.

Piglets born onto slats with a high concentration of infective bacteria

Image 2.

Cow close to calving. High concentrations of infective bacteria found in bedding sand.

 By Aled Rhys Davies