Resistance to anthelmintic drench families within the New Zealand ruminant population is a major challenge to the animal and economic performance of the sheep and beef industry. The most recent research indicates that up to 34% of farms across New Zealand have drench resistance to the standard Benzimidazole/Levamisole combination type drenches and 11% of farms have resistance to triple combinations in their sheep flock.
The guide outlines a few key ways you can use FarmIQ to record, monitor and reduce the impact of internal parasitism, plus other techniques to manage internal parasitism in association with drenching as a whole farm management policy.
The tools FarmIQ offers can help minimise the impacts of worm burden on farm. Completing these activities is easy and straightforward, but the data provides significant benefits, creating confidence in the decisions made, improving animal performance and decreasing the likelihood of increasing drench-resistance on farm.
The FarmIQ activities include:- Put in your animal health plan – it’s easy to set up a 12-month animal health plan calendar in FarmIQ and give your vet 3rd party access.
- Record your mobs and their movements – it is easy and important to graze paddocks with alternate stock classes in order to try and reduce the parasite load on individual paddocks.
- Record your faecal egg count assessment – it is a great way to determine whether drenching is required for particular mobs of stock on farm and it’s easy to review this data at the end of the season.
- Record your drench products and health treatments – there should be a strong focus on ensuring you are recording what drench families are used and when, as well as meeting farm assurance programme requirements.
- Record your pre- and post-grazing pasture covers – ensure growth is kept optimal and limit the exposure of your lambs to the high potential pasture worm burden lower down in the sward.
- Record your animal performance – keep track of all seasonal changes through regularly monitoring the liveweight gain of young stock.
- Plan crop rotations – view historical records and have information available at your fingertips in relation to what was planted and when.
These are just some of the insights available from our free essential guide, which you can download here.
Performance and Enterprise users can complete all activities involved to help minimise worm burden on farm.
