Funding vital in TB campaign

IN SOME ways, the pioneering days never ended in Buller.

John O'Connor was schooled in Nelson before coming here in 1945 to break in a block already rejected for soldier settlement. "I realise now why it was rejected," he says.

Whatever he knew about farming he'd picked up from childhood observation. He lost 30 head of stock in one of the West Coast's legendary torrents, but got back to clearing the bush and sowing grass as soon as the waters abated.

In 1952, he milked cows by hand for eight months until he built the first pipe and bale walk-through cow shed in the area, to milk 100 cows.

O'Connor was convinced – against almost all prevailing opinion – that dairying held the key to the West Coast's future and he devoted his life to making it happen.

Nature had only made farming difficult here, but in 1950, it was about to threaten its very existence. Livestock officers began testing town milk cows for the presence of bovine TB – and they found it in O'Connor's herd.

"It was devastating. My father had given me 25 head of stock to start off and we'd built them into a brilliant herd of cows. In the finish, we lost most of them, and their offspring, to TB. One of the biggest disasters was when we sent four cows to my brother's in Nelson for winter milking. They'd tested clear back in Buller, but later, they had a major outbreak of TB in that herd."

He says the disease nearly annihilated the Buller Dairy Company. "We were just losing production. We went from 400 tonnes of butter down to 280 by the late 1960s. Those years were terrible – farms were running out of cows. That's what crippled us.

"Everybody was blaming the way we farmed." The insult on top of injury was his abiding suspicion that in fact, possums were the real culprit. "But nobody was blaming it on possums in those days. That's what really got us down.

"We had a big battle to get MAF to recognise possums were causing it. It took us three years to convince the powers that be."

By then 90% of Buller farms were infected, and TB had spread into Karamea and Inangahua. Everyone was now in the same boat, and things got political. O'Connor had an abiding grievance with the compensation rates paid to farmers who lost stock to TB. "We were getting £6 a cow, when they were worth between LLL10 and LLL30."

So he took up another fight, campaigning long and hard for fair recompense, which was finally awarded – full market replacement – in the early 1970s.

With the possum link officially recognised, the tables finally began to turn on TB. Possum control began with bait stations and traps, then, in the early 70s, the first aerial 1080 operations were mounted in a bid to slow the transmission of the disease. "From then on, our reactor rates started to drop. They laid 1080 behind our farm and I remember the children coming up to the cowshed. They said; 'Dad, there's a sick possum down by the road'. I got MAF to come out and pick it up, and it was absolutely riddled with TB."

Within a decade, vector control brought infections down to just three remaining herds in the Buller. The war seemed all but won, which is perhaps why somebody in Wellington decided to scale back funding for TB control. O'Connor watched the disease rebound. He reckons that single cost-saving exercise ended up costing the country at least a billion dollars.

Vector control resumed in the late 1980s and, while the West Coast remains a hot spot, TB rates are now down to historical lows.