With summer grazing now well underway, many farmers are considering whether an internal parasite treatment (or dosing) is needed for cattle at grass.
Before dosing takes place, farmers should identify if there is a need to treat internal parasites and the best way to do this is to take a Faecal Egg Count (FEC) or a dung sample.
Dung sampling may not be the most popular job on the farm, but the results can be very useful when determining what parasite treatment, if any, is needed.
In the video below, Advantage Beef Programme farm liaison officer Gavin Healy outlines best practice when taking a dung sample:
According to Healy, the ideal time to take a sample is early in the week so samples aren’t waiting in the post over the weekend.
The easiest time to secure a fresh sample is early in the morning when cattle are still lying down.
Farmers should go out to the field with the cattle and try to get three or four fresh dung samples out of a group (size 30-40 cattle) in a sample pot.
Once the sample is secured, it can be sent off to the lab for analysis and should be back in 2-3 days.
A fresh sample should be still warm when taken. A dung sample that is cold at collection will not give an accurate result.
Reading the report
The results provided to farmers from a dung sample report are generally fairly self-explanatory.
The results provide useful information to a farmer’s veterinary practitioner when determining the best course of action regarding treatment.
It is important that each sample is clearly labelled with the name of the batch of cattle it came from, as seen in the example below.
An example of how the dung sample results are returned to farmers:
The results above show that in the suckler calves’ sample, 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,” Healy added.
A dung sampling support service is available to Advantage Beef Programme members and farmers should contact a member of the Advantage team to find out more.