Faunsdale, AL | Q500 - 12/9/2018 00:21
If you’ve been around cattle enough you can pick them out by sight. Don’t buy them in first place and make the salebarn sort them out.
You will pick some of them out just by not buying dinks, but you will miss some.
If it ever becomes commercially available, there is PCR testing that can pick out positive groups. We had one slip through the ear notch without being detected and the team at Auburn/USDA were able to pick out the group of approximately 100 yearling heifers by swabbing the feed and water troughs. She was a bit of a special case because she still was very hard to detect when we re-notched the whole group. Ended up doing virus isolation to confirm and characterize the virus.
Anyway the point is, a cow-calf producer could enroll in a preconditioning program where one of the requirements was the group of calves or herd passed an environmental swab test. It would be quite cost effective vs individual ear notching. Might be useful as a second layer of security a buyer could use before buying calves to ensure the calves were as advertised. Or it could be used as a quick?? diagnostic aid when dealing with a train wreck shipping fever situation
Edited by ccjersey 12/9/2018 08:45
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pi testing on cattle
