Farming – Agritech & Innovation · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026

For decades the standard answer to a foot-and-mouth outbreak was destruction: cull the infected herd, draw a cordon, absorb the loss. It is decisive and it is brutal, and for a farmer it can mean watching a lifetime of breeding disappear in an afternoon. In May 2023, the veterinary response chose a different path, and in doing so changed the nature of the problem it was solving.

Veterinarians chose to vaccinate rather than mass-depopulate foot-and-mouth-infected livestock, relieving farmers and raising cold-chain demand. The decision spared the herd and shifted the burden of disease control from the slaughterhouse to the supply chain, trading a one-time act of destruction for an ongoing logistical commitment.

The Shift: Treat the Herd, Do Not End It

Mass culling removes the disease by removing the animals. Vaccination aims to remove the disease while keeping the animals, which is a more demanding proposition but a far less destructive one. For Botswana, where cattle are both an economic asset and a store of household wealth measured in social as much as financial terms, the difference is not abstract. A culled herd is not just lost income; it is lost standing, lost breeding lines, lost generations of work built into a single bloodline.

The relief among farmers reported alongside the decision reflects that. A culled herd is a clean break and a total loss. A vaccinated herd is a continuing asset, provided the vaccination programme holds, and that proviso is where the new burden begins. Vaccination buys back the animal but commits the system to doing the harder work reliably and at scale, season after season.

Vaccination keeps the animal alive and the wealth with the farmer.

The Catch: Vaccines Live in the Cold Chain

The same decision that relieved farmers raised cold-chain demand, and that is the part that determines whether the strategy works. Foot-and-mouth vaccines must be kept cold from manufacture to the moment of injection. A break in that chain, in transport, storage, or at a remote cattle post far from a reliable power supply, can render a dose useless without anyone seeing the failure. The animal is injected, the record says vaccinated, and the protection is not there.

Choosing vaccination therefore commits the system to a logistics problem rather than a single act of slaughter. It needs reliable refrigeration reaching into the rural areas where cattle are kept, the trained personnel to administer doses correctly, and the record-keeping to know which herds are covered and when boosters fall due. That is precisely the kind of distributed, unglamorous capacity that is hardest to build and easiest to let slip once an outbreak fades from the headlines.

A vaccine is only as good as the cold that carries it.

The Opportunity: Logistics as the New Front Line

The rise in cold-chain demand is a cost, but it is also a signpost. Reliable refrigerated logistics into the cattle districts would serve more than foot-and-mouth control; it supports vaccines for other livestock diseases, underpins veterinary services more broadly, and connects to the agritech and processing infrastructure Botswana needs to defend the value of its herd. The vaccination decision turns disease control into an infrastructure question, and infrastructure questions can be answered with investment in a way that a cull cannot.

That is a more constructive problem to have than mass slaughter. It can be planned for, budgeted, and built, with the cold chain becoming a permanent asset rather than an emergency expense. For operators in the livestock value chain, from feedlots to the Botswana Meat Commission, a dependable cold chain is also a competitive asset, because it makes the national herd easier to keep clean and therefore easier to sell into premium markets.

Choosing the needle over the cull turns disease control into an investment.

The move to vaccinate spares the herd and the farmer, but it does not make the problem disappear. It relocates it, from the painful certainty of culling to the quieter discipline of keeping a vaccine cold across long distances. That is a trade most farmers will take, and it is one Botswana can win, but only if the cold chain it now depends on is built to last rather than improvised each time the disease returns.

Sources: allAfrica