Fi Roberts

speaker

86 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Fi Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking Dairy · Foot-and-mouth disease travel risk and simple biosecurity tips | Ep. 130 · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

We've done our first year of work in the readiness space and the council prioritised a significant amount of investment into different areas that were considered to be the most significant gaps.

We can never be 100% prepared and so there's always work to be done.

But the important thing about having industry in the tent is that we get to decide what's key and critical from our perspective or from farmers' perspective.

So some of the work that we've been doing in the last year, it was core readiness foundations that were sort of in place.

And a couple of those things include laboratory diagnostic supplies and maintaining an FMD vaccine bank.

Those things have always been in place, but now that the industry is involved under the agreement, we get a say in getting the best deal for those supplies, getting the best deal for the vaccine bank and having a say around the costs and so on to make sure that the deal is efficient as possible.

In terms of the other work, it's sort of about strengthening capability, making a practical difference in a response.

So we've undertaken a review of the four key operational plans that will be used in the event of an FMD response.

And that's around cleaning and disinfection, destruction protocols, movement control, that sort of thing.

And that's thrown up a number of gaps, some of which we've known about for some time.

But council's role now is to really prioritise what we work on first.

That work's been undertaken already.

We are also doing a big project around workforce planning.

And we want to make sure that the industry folk are well and truly embedded in any response.

At the end of the day, they're the best ones to support farmers through a crisis and also ensure that we can bolster the workforce that MPI will bring to the table.

We're doing a significant piece of work around the compensation settings.

So this is essentially, you know, the compensation arrangements that we had for M. bovis will look a little bit different during FMD just purely because of the scale of the outbreak.

And we need to make sure that we get cash into farmers' pocket early, that they're well supported and that there's clarity around those compensation settings.

The other thing we continuously work on is making sure that we've got pre-prepared comms, that we're ready to go in the event of an outbreak, and that those communications are aligned across industry and government.

Darien Zed is investing on farmers' behalf that levy funding into the FMD Council work plan.

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