Don’t touch our badgers – they keep our herd TB-free

‘Your fridge is smelling very French,” my mother says with a wrinkled nose as she pulls her head out of the fridge.

In between calving, grazing rotations, slurry spreading and the usual deskwork, I’ve been experimenting, making yoghurt and cheese with the organic milk we’re now producing on the farm.

At the moment, it’s just all for home consumption, which means that every time my mother visits for lunch, she finds the fridge at least 70pc full of various experimental dairy products.

On the plus side, I’m yet to poison any family members; on the down side the fridge does smell a bit like a cheese counter in a French village. It’s not a bad smell, just a little French.

We’re also refurbishing the 300-year-old thick stone-walled dairy in order to gain Department of Agriculture certification so we can produce all these dairy goods commercially. As one of my cousins recently commented, I’m turning what was a hobby into a full-blown little income stream.

Of course, all grand plans come with a catch. One of the major catches for us is if we go down with TB, I won’t be able to sell raw milk or cream.

The logic is that the milk might pass all the cleanliness tests thrown at it but if there’s TB in the herd it could be passed onto humans that drink it. So you have to have two TB tests every year if you want to sell raw milk, plus a licence from the Department and pass a full gamut of testing.

Thankfully we have never had TB in the 30-plus years we’ve been farming here and we passed our most recent test in January. However, given the ongoing rise of TB across the country, I’ve become hyper-vigilant regarding the issue.

While some people have had issues with wildlife when it comes to TB, whatever delicate balance is going on with the ecosystem around us, we’ve never had any problems with the local badger den.

Badgers are fiercely territorial, and while the young males might roam for a little hanky-panky and move into a den in the next town over, most badger families live forever in roughly a two-kilometre radius of their main den.

If you kill a badger family, all you’ve done is create a ready-made home for a new family of badgers — potentially a family carrying TB. Given our badger family live within 500m of the farm, and we’ve happily co-existed for 30 years without TB, I’m fairly confident that they aren’t TB carriers.

If someone tried to cull or tamper with my local badger family and upset the ecosystem that seems to be keeping us TB-free, then I’d feel like culling them.

This leaves the risk of bringing in TB from moving cattle into the farm. We are at a nice stage where we are almost a closed herd, apart from the arrival of a new stock bull every few years.

So I’m thinking of taking the plunge and going full AI and investing in heat-detecting collars. My subconscious must have been weighing this up for a while because I applied for and got a 60pc TAMS grant for the collar system last June.

I’ve even had two different companies give me a quote, with collars for both the dairy and suckler stock.

This issue is more pressing, given breeding season is just around the corner and our home-bred Hereford bull got a knock in his delicate area which led to some swelling last year.

He still managed to put some heifers in calf late in the season but there is a still a slight bulge from where the infection was and I’m worried it will flare up again.

After the TAMS grant, we’re looking at paying about €1,700 for the system based on one company’s quote.

This initially sounds like good value given that a high-quality stock bull should set you back around €3,000, but then you have to look at the annual AI costs which would come to about €500, not even taking into account cows or heifers who were repeat offenders. Then you have to take into account the time the farmer has to be around to bring in cows to AI.

But with all the investment we’re making in the dairy, can I risk bringing TB into the herd?

It’s a lot to juggle, but a friend of mine has given me a new vanilla and honey ice cream recipe to try out with our milk and cream, which should get my mother off my back about the French-smelling fridge and solve at least one of my problems.

‘If someone tried to cull or tamper with my local badger family … I’d feel like culling them’