Vaccination clinic for small-scale cattle owners in Franklin

In 2019, plans were afoot for HGA to work alongside Franklin dairy farmer, Richard Mingay, to construct a cattle handling facility adjacent to the Franklin community in order to vaccinate animals against the likes of Bovine brucellosis (Contagious Abortion: CA) which is of great concern in the area. As the land earmarked for construction was municipal we approached Greater Kokstad Municipality with our proposal for the facility. Unfortunately a whole year passed before permission was finally granted by which time it had become increasingly unfeasible for Franklin community residents to keep livestock on account of the fact that the vast majority of the grazing land that they were previously utilising had changed ownership. A decision was therefore made to shelve the idea of the construction of the facility and to instead arrange a series of vaccination clinics. The first of these took place from the Mingay’s dairy in early December and around 170 cattle were treated for liver fluke and ticks and 104 vaccinated against CA. Thanks go to MSD for the donation of the CA vaccines and ear tags, to the Mingays for the use of their facility, and to Cornelius Kritzinger from Cedarville for running the clinic at a nominal fee.