Been to Bali, too? Wipe your feet when coming back home

When you visit someone’s house, you wipe your feet — the same should apply to your country.

Locals making the great escape overseas after two years of international travel bans, should ensure they don’t bring any uninvited and unwelcome guests back, when they return!

Recent discovery of the greatest threat to our livestock sector in Bali, and an outbreak near Newcastle of a parasite that could devastate our apiary and orchard industries, are sober news for our recovering agricultural sector.

For both NSW Farmers representative and Millthorpe farmer, Bruce Reynolds, and local apiarist, Sam Lockwood, the outbreaks show the importance of eternal vigilance in maintaining our “clean and clean” agriculture industries.

News of the deadly foot-and-mouth disease on the popular holiday resort island only a few hundred nautical miles off the Australian mainland, is a particular worry for local graziers, Reynolds said.

“To the livestock industry, the estimates of the cost are up to $80 billion, that’s how serious it is.

“It’s been found in a couple of provinces in Indonesia, but Bali, as a resort island, is the big worry,” he added.

Australia, with its endemic wild pig, goat, and deer problems and geographic size, would be particularly vulnerable to an outbreak.

“Particularly if it became established in feral animals, it would be almost impossible to eradicate, because you could never get every individual infected animal, like you can on a quarantined farm,” Reynolds explained. 

While our quarantine service and biosecurity measures are world-class, much depends on the attitude and observance of individual returning travellers, he added.

“Don’t bring any animal products with you when you return from overseas and, if you’re coming back after the school holidays, make sure you declare everything.”

But it’s not just in strict compliance, but also in using your common sense, that we can keep this threat — which has cost countries like Great Britain tens of billions of pounds to contain — out of our livestock industries.

“If you go to a farm in Bali, get any dirt on your shoes or clothes, make sure you declare it in your return form.”

Even visiting small villages or going to rural Buddhist temples with a few stock animals rooting around, could be enough to endanger our FMD-free status.

Australia is currently on the front foot over the Indonesian outbreaks, providing expertise and vaccines to control its spread.

While bee-keeping is a far smaller industry than grazing, the outbreak of Varroa mites from Port Newcastle into surrounding bee hives, represents a more immediate threat, he said.

“Varroa mites are so much harder to eradicate, it’s important that producers that see something out of the ordinary, contact their Local Land Services vet.

“There are compensation packages available, so do the right thing by the industry,” he added.

Sam Lockwood from Goldfields Honey based at Vittoria between Orange and Bathurst, said, it is not just bee-keeping, but a range of other agricultural sectors, that will also be impacted if Varroa becomes endemic.

“It’s not just honey, bees are so important for their work as pollinators for a number of other industries. In two–three weeks time, from 300,000 to 350,000 beehives, will be placed in orchards around Australia,” Sam explained.

“Almonds will be the big ones affected, but apples, cherries, watermelons, pumpkins, blueberries, the list goes on and on.”

With his family the biggest honey producer in Australia, he said that containing the outbreak is, at this stage, a hope, rather than an expectation.

“We’ve got hives spread throughout NSW, Queensland and Victoria, we run almost 10,000 beehives.

“As members of the NSW Apiarists’ Association, we are just trying to establish how far its spread and put up containment lines, a sort of ‘quarantine area’, I suppose you’d call it,” he said. ​

Vigilance, again is the key, Reynolds emphasised. “Varroa is the foot-and-mouth of the pollination industry.

“No other country has eradicated it, we’re asking for local beekeepers to keep an eye out for it. If you see anything unusual, report it!” he concluded.