From paddy@quesnelbc.com Sat Apr 8 10:56:04 2000 Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2000 05:14:23 -0700 From: Paddy To: Sanet Subject: Re: Herbal Wormers for Livestock [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Dear Gwyneth, We did a fairly exhaustive search for alternate anthelminitcs (in the vernacular) on our own farm. I am sending a copy of an on-farm test to you separately. Ecological Agricultural Projects, in Quebec publishes an excellent little book entitled "The Control of Internal Parasites in Cattle and Sheep". It's available ($10 Canadian I think) from EAP Macdonald College 21, 111 Lakeshore Rd. Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec H9X 3V9 email (might not be current) info@eap.mcgill.ca Another useful book is the "Organic Livestock Handbook" by Anne Macey. Available from Canadian Organic Growers ($25.95 Can.) COG Box 6408 Sta. J Ottawa, ON K2A 3Y6 We investigated many different methods. Everything from nicotine and kerosene to high copper doses (potentially lethal to sheep) buffered with lime. Those farms with the best results seem to achieve them from a mixture of grazing sheep and cattle. Sheepdrove Farm, in Berkshire, England runs 1400 ewes, grazing pastures alternately with cattle and spot treating only when necessary. Foot rot is a bigger problem for them because the poor ewes are walking on flint stones all day! Ray Keating, at the ADDAS Research Centre, in Newcastle Upon Tyne has had good success with grazing hill flocks alternately with cattle. He has a mountain of printed material on the subject. In New Zealand, they are experimenting with breeding for resistance. This is a complicated process and I cannot speak to it's progress. On our own farm, we have returned to regular worming of the ewes, late in pregnancy, and worming of lambs when necessary. Our slaughter weights had dropped an average ten pounds over four years of trying to do without late pregnancy worming. Good luck, Paddy To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail