Contagious abortion: Farmers need to test their herds

AS I travel around different communities of Matabeleland I am met with excited comments from livestock farmers as they all acknowledge that they have a lot of calves this year.

This means the calving percentage increased in their herds this year and half the time farmers are not able to explain why.

In fact if they make an effort to find out why they will derive lessons which are definitely valuable for herd management.

What most farmers do not realise is that the calving percentage of their herd increased this year mostly because of a very good season last year in terms of the amount of rainfall received and therefore the state of the veld was way much better compared to other years.

This, therefore, means your herd generally had a good to fair nutritional status throughout the year and invariably a good body condition score as well. Therefore your cows and heifers were able to come on heat regularly and they were obviously serviced by bulls that were also in a proper body condition score.

The lesson here for the farmers is that they should take a keen interest in the nutritional status and subsequently the body condition score of their animals throughout the year, if these are to be productive.

Admittedly, there are a number of factors that contribute to the increase or decrease in the calving percentage in your herd and these may work individually or in combination.

Other factors affecting your calving percentage may relate to whether there is a bull in your herd or not.

If you do not have a bull it means most of your cows and heifers will be coming in and out of heat without being serviced.

Therefore, a lot of productive reproductive cycles are lost simply because the farmer has no dedicated bull for the herd.

Another factor which can have a serious bearing on the calving percentage in your herd is the health status of cows and heifers.

This relates to the reproductive health of the breeding cows and heifers. The most common reproductive disease being Brucellosis which is also commonly known as contagious abortion (CA).

This manifests through abortions in your herd (ukuphunza kwenkomo) usually around seven months of pregnancy.

The animal just aborts with no signs of being ill or being unhealthy. This is a disease of economic importance to the farmer almost a whole year of production is lost through abortion.

Cows that are carriers of CA also tend to have longer inter-calving periods (zelamisela khatshana).

The disease cannot be treated but your breeding animals can be vaccinated against the disease. You need to vaccinate your heifers at around eight months of age and they will be protected from the disease for the rest of their productive life.

If you have cows that are aborting in your herd, it’s about time you visited your veterinary officer. The veterinary officer will bleed your cows and heifer and send the blood specimens for serological tests. The tests will show you which cows in your herd are carriers of the disease and the next logical thing is to offload these freeloaders! Needless to say this kind of test comes at a cost but the cost is nothing compared to the animals and the productive years that are lost through abortions.

The test is just $4/animal and certainly your calf aborted by this animal will not cost that.

This is therefore a call for farmers to conduct tests on their herds if they are incurring abortions or else you will waste a lot of years carrying excess cabbage which is not contributing to your herd growth.

I am however alive to the logistics involved especially considering the fact that the Veterinary department is itself not adequately resourced to go around collecting specimens from smallholder farmers for onward transmission to the laboratory. Nonetheless smallholder farmers who have the means to facilitate this should seriously do it in their herd.