OSPRI News: November recap 2024

On the road with Sam: Visiting OSPRI committees

It’s been a busy few weeks for our CE Sam McIvor as he attends the recent round of OSPRI committee meetings. These groups of farmers and rural professionals collectively play an important role in supporting OSPRI’s reach and provide a range of perspectives as we consider our activities and direction. 

For Sam, it was a first-time meeting with many of our members, and he valued their time out from the farm, passion in the sector, and interest in our work. 

“It was great to meet the people, some with long-lived experience in our programmes. They are hugely knowledgeable, with a deep understanding of the issues, their communities, and are absolutely committed to OSPRI’s success.”

Our committees first took the form of Regional Health Animal Committees (RHACs) in the mid-1990s, working with rural community to tackle large numbers of TB-infected herds. While the number of infected herds has decreased significantly over the years, the committees have remained in place, widening their support to OSPRI’s other programmes.

“I see the committees being very valuable as a sounding board, providing eyes and ears in the community”, says Sam.

“They are a conduit for information both from and to farmers and other stakeholders and provide a real on-the-ground understanding of both the risks and opportunities that OSPRI’s programmes face at a regional level”.

OSPRI now has 12 committees across the country, from the Upper North Island to Southland – great mates, keeping us grounded!  If you’d like to know more about our committees and the work they do, visit the page below. You can also submit an expression of interest if you’d like to join a committee near you.

OSPRI to take on TB testing

OSPRI’s Board of Directors recently approved plans to bring on-farm TB testing in-house. This follows the recent decision from AsureQuality to not renew their contract with OSPRI for on-farm TB testing services.

By delivering TB testing ourselves, we believe there are other benefits too. Firstly, it introduces more agility, whether that’s responsiveness to emerging technology or when changes in TB testing are needed quickly. It also creates an opportunity to welcome experienced and certified testers (already familiar to farmers), which reduces the risk of disruption to the TBfree programme. Our discussions with current TB testers have already been met with an enthusiastic response.

As we move forward with this new approach, and refine the delivery of this work, we may still rely on pockets of sub-contracting - where it makes sense to do so.

OSPRI takes over on-farm TB testing on 1 July 2025, before then both AsureQuality and OSPRI are working closely to ensure a smooth transition for farmers.  

During the transitionary period testing has been reduced in lower-risk areas. More information about livestock TB testing and how we manage disease control in different areas of New Zealand, can be found on our website.

Happy holidays from the team at OSPRI

Our offices will be closed from 20 December 2024. We will reopen at 8am on Monday 6 January 2025.

Our Support Centre will operate with a skeleton crew during this period. For any urgent queries, leave us a voicemail and we will return your call as soon as possible. For non-urgent matters, send us an email at info@ospri.co.nz.

If you need support over the holiday period, our website has plenty of useful resources that may be able to help. Check out the page below for links to the most commonly accessed topics.