Mitch Cooper
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Mitch Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, so just for a bit of context, Exercise Farmgate was a field exercise in the beautiful Taranaki where I live, where they simulated the first 72 hours of a response on a case farm, basically a drill.
And the intent of that was A, to practice it, but B, to get all of the relevant parties along and see what actually happens in FND response and see, you know, just there's a huge amount of decision making that needs to happen now
on a farm when you do find FMD or when you suspect a case of FMD.
And that is really, really important for people to understand and see what that looks like in practice.
So, yeah, they essentially compacted, you know, the first 72 hours down into a day, what it would look like for the initial investigating veterinarians to come onto the farm, what that process looks like to, you know, get samples, get them back to the lab, to call a farm positive, to go through effectively the operational plans that Fi touched on,
the movement control, the destruction plan, the disposal plan, the cleaning and disinfection plan, all of those, there are quite a number of decisions that need to be made at quite pace in the initial disease response.
And it's really, really important that we practice those now and then to make sure that everyone who's involved in those decisions is well in the know, understands exactly what's happening in those operational plans,
which, as Fee said, are sort of constantly being improved and allows us to make sensible decisions that minimise the impact on the country and the economy and the farmer and maximise our ability to respond to that disease outbreak.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a lot of the people involved in the day itself were the people who will be in those roles or in teams that will be involved in those roles in the event of an FND outbreak.
So for them, it is a little bit of practice.
One of the things I should mention is that there's a lot of
I guess focus on disease management and the sort of practical side of things but one big thing that really was a huge focus in that exercise was also how to support the farmer because I think it's easy to forget that yes F&D is an economically devastating issue and you know for our economy and
in the bigger picture.
But at an individual farm level, it's a massive devastation to that farmer.
It's a huge emotional toll, compensations there.
So hopefully it's not a significant financial toll, but there are a lot of really challenging human aspects to foot and mouth disease.
You know, you start sort of putting movement controls on farms all around the country as well.
And it makes lots of sort of day-to-day farming practices really, really difficult.
And so, you know, it's important that alongside the disease management aspect of things like we practice in these exercises, it's really, really important to make sure that we focus on the people involved as well.
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