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| Blood test all cows at preg check and cull any positives that show up. Do this for several years. Sell any cow immediately if she starts getting thin especially if you notice she has pea soup diarrhea. They'll usually break with symptoms around calving time so don't be afraid to pull the calf and ship her. Don't keep or buy ANY heifers for replacements for many years (at least until you stop detecting positives and stop getting sick ones). Buy older cows to keep your numbers up instead of heifers.
This is all you can do to clean it up. I wouldn't worry about the soil much, it's not like many other cattle diseases where the bacteria is primarily soil borne. It's a disease that lies dormant in animals' guts for years rather than in the soil.
I brought it into my herd with a yearling breeding bull. I ended up culling about half of the cows that were heifer calves here while he was on the place here because they either tested positive for it or they broke with it. All cows were 3-4 year olds when it was detected (one might have been 5).
This was quite a few years ago now, and I started keeping heifers again, but there's no way to be sure I still don't have it in the herd. It's looking more likely that I cleaned it up every year that goes by without a sick one. They call it an "Iceberg" disease because when you find one, that means there's almost certainly a bigger problem under the surface. | |
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I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus... Johne’s disease... what’s a guy supposed to do?
