 I'm Dr Mary Carr, Chief Veterinary Officer of South Australia, and I'm pleased to welcome you to the Red Meat and Wool Growth Programme production brought to you by the Department of Primary Industries and Regions, Livestock SA, Animal Health Australia and the University of Adelaide. Today, we are exploring the Enhanced Abattoir Surveillance Programme with a focus on rib fractures. Enhanced Abattoir Surveillance tracks the health conditions of sheep found at the abattoir. These findings are provided to producers to assist with planning around prevention and management of prevalent animal health conditions. Refracture is not a very common condition in South Australian abattoirs. It is very property and season specific. Over the last three years, only one in 15 properties had animal with broken ribs, and only one in 40 consignment had reported cases of broken ribs. At the animal level, you would only find on average one in every 200 slaughtered animal with broken ribs. Although this is a rare condition in South Australia, since the inception of the Enhanced Abattoir Surveillance Programme in 2007, we saw a steady increase in this frequency of findings in the state, except in the last three years when we observed a slight decline. Overall, rib fractures are much more common in lambs than in muttons. From a regional point of view, lambs with broken ribs would more likely come from the southeast when muttons with rib fractures would come from the northern pastoral region. Although there is no apparent seasonality in muttons with rib fractures, we see a very strong seasonality in lambs where most rib fractures are being detected in spring. Rib fractures encompass a recently fractured ribs, or broken ribs, and healing ribs, and so we've got callus formation, and so it takes about two months for a rib to heal, and so the evidence will be present in any animal that's slaughtered, basically from a fracture that's just occurred during trucking right through to an animal that might have fractured their ribs a couple months ago, and it can be one or several ribs affected. We tend to find as it's usually only one or two ribs in any one carcass. So rib fractures can be caused by physical force, and so if an animal's had a nasty accident being trodden on or bashed around going through sheep yards, but more commonly we recognise it's associated with a nutritional deficiency, and that may be either simply vitamin D, and so during winter we recognise that southern Australia is predisposed to vitamin D deficiency, which impacts on the calcium availability in the body, so a lack of vitamin D, a lack of sunlight results in poor calcium uptake, and so you end up with an osteoporosis or weak bones, but we can also have calcium and or copper deficiency, and there's a number of other macro-entrace elements which may also play a role in that. From the Enhanced Abitur Surveillance Program we recognise that lambs with rib fractures come from lines all over the state, but primarily it's the higher rainfall areas. The Fluorio Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, Mid and Lower Southeast for example, are the hot spots for rib fractures. I might add that it is primarily a problem of lambs because by the time you get to hog it or adult stage usually the animal's ribs are far more robust and so less inclined to be broken. So it's often deficiencies associated with either the pregnant U or the newborn lamb that are going to have weak bones that are prone to being broken. Rib fractures present in anywhere in the thorax and they can be in this early stage that can be mild but in the later stages it will be more acute and will cause pleurisy. For the producer the impact is that he's going to get less weight over the scales, he's going to get a downgraded carcass because the processor will be able to recover less primal cuts. The inspectors are trained to look for fractures or adhesions or broken ribs, if they find it it goes on to the retain rail and removed by trimming. So the rib fractures we had in our lambs we actually hadn't noticed anything on farm and we weren't aware of the fact that we had this issue until we saw in the plant the rib fractures in our lambs and we're getting that feedback from the the processor. On farm there was no way of us really identifying that we were suffering any loss as a result of the rib fractures. Seeing the number of lambs going through the chain that were impacted by rib fractures and seeing those ribs trimmed out of the carcass you can imagine that every one of them adds up to you know 400 grams or 500 grams and if you add that up along the chain pretty quickly you're starting to lose kilos and kilos of meat out of the kill. So to me yeah there's a loss in kilos of lamb but it was also the loss in production of that lamb running around the paddock with a bunch of broken ribs so for me it was important to identify what was doing it and try and rectify it. Once we identified that we had the rib fracture problem we talked to a few stock agents and local people who you know we thought might have had some ideas about what was causing these rib fractures and generally the advice was nutrition because at the moment there's obviously been work done on the nutrition effect and rib fractures but also typically with shearing and crutching there was a lot of talk around mechanical and how mechanically they could have been broken. So the issue we had here was the ribs were being broken in our way box on the rear gate so as a lamb entered the first lamb dropped the floor which shut the rear gate and if a second lamb happened to be following close behind it would pin them on the rib cage and having thought about it after seeing that we had these rib fractures we decided that that was a fairly likely cause of the problem and just with a few adjustments to the way we operate and getting a new handler that operate in a totally different manner we've now no longer see the case of rib fractures in our kills. I've followed many lines of lambs through the plant in the last sort of three four years and I don't see any numbers of rib fractures now compared to what I'd saw when we first identified the problem so I would be very confident saying that our rib fracture issues being sorted luckily it wasn't the nutritional one that is going around it was an easy fix just purely out of the way we manage our stock and the equipment we use we also embarked on a process of upgrading our yards we had a fairly old-fashioned set of yards that were developed over time by my grandpa and my dad and they were fairly rickety didn't have good flow there was lots of corners points where the animals would rub around and pressure points and in building these yards we've tried to make it so the stock flow much more freely through the yards and there's less opportunity for them to be pinched or pushed into a corner or caught on something it's very important to have infrastructure that is suited to good animal movement. When we talk rib fractures you might have one or two percent associated with perhaps an unfortunate physical injury but most of the time it's going to be more associated with mineral deficiencies vitamin D deficiencies the important strategy is for producers to actually be aware of what deficiencies are in their flock and that may require soil testing plant tissue analysis all used should be getting calcium supplements in the lead up to lambing because there are a number of different circumstances whether they're on short dry feed long lush feed on a prolonged grain diet that they're always going to be calcium deficient diets and so I recommend that calcium supplements should be provided to all use in the last six to eight weeks of lambing to encourage a good skeletal development in the in the unborn fetuses vitamin A D&E for example injections in the last six weeks before lambing can also not only reduce the risk of rib fractures but it also improves calcium metabolism and so reduces the risk of dystocia or difficult birth as well so and then the vitamin E is also an immuno stimulant so it prevents the likelihood of infection so you'll get seasonal variations for sure and it's always the more the wetter years or the higher rainfall years where we see a lot more rib fractures occurring but some properties and they may know through feedback from the enhanced saboteurs violence program occur every year and so yeah they need to seriously think about preventative strategies to minimize the risk and of course they'll get the benefit through improved welfare and growth rates in their land as a result of the enhanced abattoir surveillance and the feedback we were seeing from the plant we identified that we had the rib fracture problem looked into it found a potential problem made some changes to our infrastructure to avoid that problem in the future and now we're seeing much less prevalence of rib fractures and going forward I can't see why they should return here on this farm between 2007 and 2021 the Department of Primary Industries and Regions managed the enhanced abattoir surveillance program at Lobothal and Murray Bridge with funding from estate and national sheep industry funds and national industry funding from meat and livestock Australia it was the EAS program that provided producers with the feedback discussed in this video although EAS monitoring has ceased there are plans in place to transition to entering South Australian data into the national system this national data can inform the development and funding of appropriate industry and government initiatives on the ground to better support South Australian producers to reduce losses caused by unnecessary carcass trimming and to take advantage of premium markets to assist producers animal health Australia has partnered with PURSA to create the sheep health conditions carcass impacts tool a 3d digital tool designed to show the industry what six common conditions look like on a carcass and give them an idea of how much trim may occur at the processor Livestock SA encourages all producers to talk to their processes about what carcass and disease and condition data they can access from their consignments thanks for watching we hope you have learned more about rip fractures and the importance of managing sheep health with the help of enhanced abattoir surveillance to find out more or get support with your business contact your local animal health adviser from the Department of Primary Industries and Regions or the South Australian livestock biosecurity extension team through the Livestock SA office the red meat and wool growth program is an initiative of the government of South Australia and supported by meat and livestock Australia the South Australian sheep and cattle industry funds and sheep connect SA