The APHA Animal Health and Welfare Pathway is a government fund that has been running for a year now and is designed to pay for a vet to visit your farm to carry out a health and welfare review. This review is for any beef, sheep, pig or dairy farm so long as you meet the minimum stocking requirements;
- 11 or more beef cattle
- 21 or more sheep
- 51 or more pigs, or
- 11 or more dairy cattle
You can claim for more than one veterinary review, but it has to be at least 10 months after the first one. The funding for this will be available every year for 3 years. You must have an SBI number linked to a CPH number.
Once you have applied and received an “agreement number”, contact us and we can come out to do your review. It can be any type of review within reason, based on what is most useful to you! Recent examples include: disease investigations (such as the prevalence of Neospora in your breeding cows), fertility assessment in sucklers or investigating a pneumonia problem in youngstock. It can be used for trace element testing in cattle herds/sheep flocks, bull or ram breeding examinations, nutrition assessment or worming and fluke assessment and control – investigating wormer resistance for example. We have also used the funding for staff training where issues on farm have occurred – for example towards AI training, or our lambing/calving courses. It really has helped start individual discussions on what actually will help each farm.
There is one stipulation from APHA, involving some testing of animals. For beef animals, 5 youngstock over 10 months of age have to be tested for BVD antibodies. For sheep, it is faecal worm egg counts in 10 lambs less than a year old. For pigs, 30 have to be tested for PRRS. Dairy cattle can be tested either through bulk milk BVD antigen, or the 5 youngstock bloods for BVD antibodies.
Once the agreement number has been given to the farmer, the farmer has 6 months to carry out the testing and submit our review. Once the review is submitted the money goes directly to the farmer.
Please give us a ring, as we can help talk you through this funding and ensure you benefit from it.
Want to read more? Click HERE
Written by: Jenny Clayton, Veterinary Surgeon
