126 | Right kind of help for better cow health Mike Sheppard on the job. Kelly Deeks RURAL PEOPLE » Vet4Farm Modern dairy vet Mike Sheppard of Vet4Farm in Southland is bringing meaning, worth, and value to his clients on their journeys towards compliance and improved farming systems. Mike has been in the dairy industry in Southland since 2002, for two years as a mixed practice vet, a year as a pharmaceutical rep for Pfizer then having enjoyed the farm work, went back to practicing and set up Vet4Farm in 2007. He has seen huge improvements on Southland dairy farms in the past 20 years. “When I first started, dairy was quite new to Southland and was having a resurgence. People from Canterbury and the Waikato were buying farms down here, but the skill levels on farms were limited, and there were limited skills to draw on in the local workforce. Dairy is now well established and skill levels are very, very high. All the measuring and monitoring and compliance work can be a real headache for farmers, but their expertise is growing with it.” Like his farmer clients, Mike and other modern dairy vets are always looking for efficiencies, better cow health, and use of fewer medicines. A new web portal on the Vet4Farm website is the latest in Mike’s initiatives to add value to his offering, and it gives farmers easy access to all of their farm medical records in real time and the ability to self-manage compliance and order medications from their account. “Farmers are doing a huge amount of compliance work on their farms,” he says. “Whatever we can do to make it meaningful and worthwhile and add some value, to not only achieving their compliance but also improving their farming systems, is where the modern dairy vet is at.” Mike says the wider veterinarian community is doing very well with its work into antimicrobial resistance, and Mike sends samples from every farm on his books to the Netherlands where bacteria is grown, if possible, to show whether antimicrobial resistance is increasing or decreasing. “If a cow has a case of mastitis, which is the most common use of antibiotics on dairy farms, we can grow the bacteria right there and the next day come up with an accurate treatment,” he says. “The more accurate you can be with the treatment, the less resistance you cause.” Some Vet4Farm clients are adopting new cow collar technology, a growth area and a game changer for animal health. This technology is bringing efficiencies to Mike’s operation as well as to farmers’ businesses, as it provides data that simply wasn’t available before and enables more effective and efficient treatments. The future use of this captured data is in cow nutrition, another growth area and Vet4Farm is going to be prepared for it as Mike looks for a cow nutritionist to join the team. Mike says while dairy vets have similar knowledge and skills, how a farmer chooses a vet comes down to the relationship. “The farmer has the overriding view of everything, financial, environmental, and farmers spend a lot of their time doing HR these days as well. Vets are one part of that farming system. With a bit of mutual respect and the ability to disagree with each other, we can have constructive discussions and still be friends at the end of it.” “Mastatest has taken the guess work out of mastitis for us. We’re getting higher and faster cure rates and our cell count is down 100,000 compared to last year” Evidence based vet medicines 0800 821 421 www.agrihealth.co.nz On-farm rapid Mastitis test Bugged by High Cell Counts? Contact us on 0800 821 421 or talk to your local vet Test high SCC cows on-farm to identify the bug in 24 hours Reduce somatic cell count to achieve milk premiums AHMASTA-RSP.11.22 Paul Mahony, 650 cows, Waikato farmer
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