Cattle tick fever crosses border

Yesterday with a dozen cattle dead and others in danger of dying on their Burringbar property it came true, due to cattle tick fever from Queensland.

"They are pretty devastated by it all. It's a huge blow," said fellow grazier and chairperson of the Combined Tweed Rural Industries Association, Col Brooks.

The Harnetts, whose family has farmed the property near the heart of Burringbar for generations, were not talking publicly, with their farm quarantined and milk production stopped.

"It's not a problem they created," Mr Brooks said. "It's a problem someone else created and the government let them."

For more than a century successive NSW governments, supported by farmers fought to keep out cattle tick fever, originally spread into Queensland on water buffalo from Indonesia in the 1800s.

"I really think farmers are going to have to take some kind of legal action against the state government," said Mr Brooks.