Abstract
www.ibTB.co.uk plots the location of all cattle herds in England and Wales affected by Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) in the last 10 years. It was developed as a tool to inform farmers about the bTB risks in their area and help them take proportionate steps to reduce the threat to their herds.
Prior to its launch in 2015, information on bTB incidents was viewed as personal, confidential and not to be shared. There was therefore limited information available to farmers about local bTB risks and to support livestock purchasing decisions. However, in 2015 Defra and the Welsh Government (WG) in consultation with the farming industry decided that releasing bTB data was integral to their long-term strategies for the eradication of bTB and in line with their open data policy (#OpenDefra).
To enable the sharing of bTB data, both Defra and the WG needed to change legislation (their respective TB Orders) to allow the publishing of information on bTB affected herds. Once these legislative hurdles were overcome, the decision was made to create a spatial mapping system - Defra and WG had seen the benefits of various internal Geographical Information Systems (GIS) already in use. The specification for ibTB was underpinned by two key principles. a) The data published should be accurate, timely and contain no personal information and b) The system should be simple to use, and should be searchable by the farm identifier (County Parish Holding) and postcode.
In 2018 the development team held a series of meetings with farming groups across England and Wales to better understand their requirements for ibTB and in particular to assess the system’s suitability as a portal for information to support Informed Responsible Trading (IRT). As well as confirming that ibTB was an appropriate tool for the display of IRT information, the survey identified distinct requirements for several subsets of users, such as farmers in high and low bTB risk areas, veterinarians and TB advisors. These requirements have been distilled into a series of staged system improvements, which were released in tranches up to October 2021.
The impacts of ibTB are difficult to gauge, because as an open access site, there is currently no way of tracking users and linking to their other bTB data to see if it is affecting their behaviours and reducing their herd’s risk of contracting bTB. Usage of the system has steadily increased over time and now stands at around 800 hits/day. The link to ibTB via a major cattle trading app provides about half the traffic, which shows that the system is being used to inform farmer trading.