In the run up to winter housing, many farmers are now considering their winter parasite treatment protocol for cattle and the first step should be to take a dung sample.
Dung sample results provide an essential guideline to internal parasite treatment (such as worms and fluke) in cattle.
Dung sampling may not be the most glamorous job, but the results can be very useful when determining what parasite treatment, if any, is needed.
Beef farmers taking part in the Beef Environmental Efficiency Programme – Sucklers (BEEP-S) scheme who opted for the dung sampling option as part of the programme have taken dung samples already and will therefore be familiar with the procedure.
ABP Food Group’s Advantage Beef Programme team is advising all of its members to take a dung sample from their cattle to check for the presence of internal parasites before going in with an anthelmintic treatment.
Agriland recently caught up with the Advantage Beef Programme farm liaison team leader Amie Coonan, to find out more about best practice when dung-sampling cattle.
Amie used results taken from a farm in Co. Sligo that is participating in the Advantage Beef Programme as an example of how to interpret the results.
Amie said: “It is important that farmers dung sample or Fecal Egg Count (FEC) their cattle and use the results to dose in a sustainable manner. Going in and blanket dosing everything is not the solution and can create resistance to dosing products.”
How they’re taken
A dung sample should ideally be taken early in the morning and early in the week to ensure the sample gets to the lab for testing on time and is not left lying over the weekend.
“Farmers should go out to the field with the cattle and try to get three or four fresh samples out of a group (size 30-40 cattle) in a sample pot,” said Amie.
“It needs to be from fresh dung so you need to stand in the field until the animals dung and take a sample from the fresh dung with a spoon.
“If you go into a group of cattle that have been lying for a while, you will get plenty of samples when they rise up,” she said.
“A sample from each batch of cattle should be taken and put into a sample pot and sent to an approved laboratory for examination and the results are generally back with the farmer within 2-3 days.”
Example of how the dung sample results are returned to farmers:
Commenting on the results used in the above example, Amie said: “The results are generally fairly self-explanatory.”
She also added that the results provide useful information to a farmer’s veterinary practitioner when determining the best course of action regarding treatment.
In this example, the suckler cow results indicate that no worm or fluke eggs were present and thus there was no need to treat the suckler cows on this farm for internal parasites.
In the September 2021-born calves, rumen fluke eggs were seen.
The results show that in the suckler calves’ dung, 100 Moniezia eggs/g were present in the FEC and no rumen or liver fluke eggs were seen in the Fluke Egg Screen.
“The 100 eggs/g seen in this sample isn’t a huge amount. Normally, the advice is that if the sample results show 500 eggs or more per gram, an anthelmintic treatment is necessary,” said Amie.
“The advice given to the farmer in this scenario was to monitor the cattle’s performance and if they started coughing, a dose should be used.
“These calves weren’t coughing and the count was low so there was no need to dose them at that stage.
“Most animals will have some level of fluke in them. Rumen fluke eggs were seen in the September 2021 calves but the level was unknown,” she added.
Treatment
The farmer had noted that the calves weren’t thriving as well as they should be. Because of this, he decided to use a fluke treatment on the batch.
“If they were thriving, the advice would be not to dose. You need to look at the full picture before deciding to take action or not,” said Amie.
She added that this farmer had initially planned to blanket treat all the cattle with a dose, as often happens on many farms.
However, following an analysis of the dung sample results and looking at the performance of each group of cattle, the decision was made to only treat the September 2021 calves for rumen fluke.
Outcome
Amie explained that there is a time and cost saving to be made by dung sampling, which also helps to reduce the risk of resistance by only dosing when necessary.
“If the relevant treatment is used when necessary and a full worm kill is not achieved, then it indicates there may be a resistance issue with the product used,” she said.