An important part of farm biosecurity, and also of managing your business, is ensuring staff are well trained, that you have the ability to trace where animals or plants have come from and where they went and that you have records of purchases, sales and movements.
Here are some templates for records to help you assess the biosecurity risks on your farm and start to minimise them. In some cases, multiple versions of documents are available for differing purposes.
If an appropriate form is not available for your industry, you can use the headings in the examples below to create record sheets to suit your needs.
Signs can be used to indicate to visitors the importance of following biosecurity procedures on your property. This Farm Biosecurity gate sign template is actual size ( 900 x 600 mm) and can be used by signwriters to print warning signs on a range of different materials. Include contact details in the space provided.
For recording date and time of cleaning, vehicle identification, and use of vehicle pre- and post-cleaning.
Training staff in biosecurity measures and knowing what to look out for, monitoring plants and animals for signs of disease, recording all farm activities that could infect plants or animals, and sound planning, can all reduce the possibility of an emergency animal disease or exotic plant pest to become established on your property.
Details the actions and responsibilities that are to be undertaken in the event of a suspected emergency animal disease outbreak within a feedlot or other livestock operation.
Animals can carry diseases and pests without necessarily showing any signs, so it is important to manage the introduction of new animals carefully to avoid infecting the rest of your stock. Manage new and returning stock in a similar fashion. A property owner or manager should to be able to ‘trace back’ and ‘trace forward’ if there is a disease, pest or weed incursion on their property.
Anyone working on or visiting a property (including family members working on the property) may not know how easily diseases, pests and weeds can spread and how to prevent this happening.
A biosecurity checklist for each group of crops is provided below which includes the following areas : Pests, People movement, Product management and Equipment & vehicles. Completing this checklist allows you to determine areas where biosecurity measures could be used to reduce the risk of diseases, pests and weeds entering and becoming established on your farm.
A crop monitoring record or pest surveillance sheet is also included.
For some crops (eg fruit and nuts) where production changes with age of the plant, it is useful to complete a ‘Production value record’ and to keep supporting documents. Records of productivity (eg yield and market price) will increase the accuracy of owner reimbursment cost calculations in the event of an emergency plant pest incursion under an approved response plan.
