Controlling TB on Wellington's city fringe

Caption: Near Wellington, farmers help keep possum numbers down and stop TB coming down from the hills. 
  
Richard Iremonger - Farm Manager, Battle Hill Farm Park, Pauatahanui  
 
I'm Richard Iremonger. I lease 400 hectares around Wellington here in four separate blocks, and I have the license on this farm park from Greater Wellington Regional Council, who own it and it's open to the public. 
 
We run sheep, cattle and deer here. The deer is in a farmed environment so the public can see them in that environment.  
 
I've worked on properties as shepherd and head shepherds where we've had one big property that was in three different sectors, so we'd have to TB test between each area of the farm. 
 
I have to do that here, this farm's under movement control, so we have to test from here to the other farms. 
 
I worked on a large deer farm where we had a lot of reactors, but they were only avian. So, yeah had a fair share of it around the place.  
 
Been some big changes here. I just need to keep moving forward and keep progressing, keep targeting it to keep the numbers down. 
 
There's definitely a sign of young numbers pushing back in that we need to keep control of. From what I'm aware there's ground crews that are consistently checking on the area.  
 
I was talking to a couple of older gentlemen in the farming industry, and they said to me that M. bovis today was what they dealt with, with TB back in the early days. And as a young fella, I didn't know too much about the old days of TB, and it really surprised me when he said that.  
 
I think the best way forward for knocking TB out is our own farmers doing their own control of wildlife, as well as monitoring the TB statuses with the testing, and in these bigger areas, we still need to be doing big drops to control it, so we can keep on top of it, so we can't all get out into those big areas and get a good kill. So, we need to be keeping on top of it in other ways, otherwise we're going to be in for some trouble. 
  
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