The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube, Farming Issues
THIS week we want to look at a simple management habit which seems to elude most smallholder livestock farmers.
This is the need for a timeous reaction for a sick animal and the use of veterinary personnel.
One of the major contributors of livestock mortalities in smallholder farmers is the sluggish response that is usually adopted by communal farmers to a livestock ailment.
In fact when you see most smallholder farmers consulting about their sick animal you are sure that it is almost too late to save that animal.
Unfortunately farmers also pass this bad habit to their cattle minders such that if you do not stay at the farm or if your animals are at your rural home and you are in town, chances are when you receive a message about a sick animal, it is probably already lying down with an advanced ailment which will be difficult to treat.
Added to the problem of late reporting of a sickness in your herd, is the use of cellphone treatments where the worker is just instructed to give it jabs of almost all the drugs in the cabin with the hope that one of them will treat the sickness. There is very little regard on the competences of the cattle minder in so far as reading the instructions on the label with regards to the dosage and whether the treatment has to be repeated or not.
What farmers need to know is that drugs have what are called active ingredients which define the nature of the drug, for example is it a tetracycline or antibiotic? In some cases these active ingredients can actually neutralise each other if you just jab the animal at once and the drugs will not be able to work.
Coupled to this, is the understanding of the various routes of drug administration in animal. Drugs have several different routes through which they should be administered into the animal.
These are among others oral, intramuscular, intravenous and subcutaneous. These also range from simple to highly specialised, in terms of the skill and ease of administering.
An example is the intravenous drug administration route which needs a properly skilled person to do it as you may actually kill your animal from the poor administration rather than its sickness.
It is a method that needs training and understanding of the physiology of the animal so that you appreciate what introducing air for example will do to the animal or introducing large volumes of the drug at once will do. Needless to say this is not an operation which you can routinely delegate to your cattle minder but you need to call in trained people. These are your local veterinary guys. Farmers simply need to learn to call in their local veterinary officers in time so that they can come and assist.
I know a farmer who lost a $5 000 pedigree bull simply because he trusted his worker more than trained veterinary officers.
By the time he called in veterinary officers to salvage the mess of his worker, it was too late. Admittedly in some cases the officers may be stationed far away from the farmers making it logistically difficult for an average farmer to access him/her.
However, there is still an option of an Agritex officer who may be within your ward as these are largely ward based. In fact farmers need to change their attitude towards their local veterinary officers. For some reason farmers tend not to believe in the service of the officers and would rather look far for assistance. I get farmers from far afield phoning me and consulting on their animals instead of just calling their local veterinary officer. Needless to mention a telephone based prognosis is obviously weaker than a visual assessment. This means the local guy who can rush and check the animal will provide a better diagnosis than a person relying on telephone description of the signs.
Also smallholder farmers need to know that knowledge comes at a cost and they must bear the cost.
It is not a bad idea in my view to send $10 of petrol to the veterinary officer via mobile money transfer so that he can fuel his bakkie and rush to treat your animal. Surely spending $10 to save your $500 animal makes business sense in whatever language.
In this age of cellphones if you are a livestock farmer and you do not have the number for your local veterinary officer, there is certainly something fundamentally wrong with you or you are a veterinary trained farmer. Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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