[Jacob-list] sleeping dragons

[gordon johnston]

Hi Betty and Victoria
I have left the title of 'sleeping Dragons' as it's a bit appropriate.

Initially when Foot and Mouth was discovered in the south of England on the 3rd August, a blanket ban on all movements of ungulates ie sheep, cattle, goats and pigs, was imposed throughout Great Britain (i'm not sure about Southern Ireland).  We are all back to disinfection routines as before, no-one allowed onto the farm, don't mix with other farmers etc. Now they have identified the source as a laboratory dealing in the F&M virus, which is just a few miles from the initial outbreak. Since those cattle were culled, two more premises have been culled out too.  No one could even send livestock for slaughter, which as you will understand for the large scale commercial meat production businesses has been disastrous.  No exports, and as most of the light lamb trade and nearly all the beef trade goes to the Continent (Europe), our aleady teetering agricultural system has been dealt yet another blow.  Already this year, nearly the whole country has been under floods which have ruined field crops and killed livestock.  As a nation, we were just beginning to recover from the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak and the way it was dealt with, so we are all, English, Scottish, Welsh and N.Irish, stunned by yet another blow. We are a small island, so at a time like this the subdivisions don't really matter.  Having said that, the Scottish Parliament has taken some decisions to help the industry up here to start crawling again at least.  Today, in Scotland we are allowed to send animals for slaughter, under licence.  The English Parliament is now contemplating the same thing for premises well away from the outbreak in the south.  For some reason, collection of fallen stock had also been banned, so many farmers have rotting carcases, nothing to do with F&M, which they were not allowed to have collected (all fallen stock in Britain has had to be collected by lorry and incinerated since 2001), nor were they allowed to bury it on-farm. Scotland is now allowing on-farm burial (thank goodness - even though we are having a cold summer, it is still not good having carcases lying around in what heat we have). England will probably follow suit under public pressure shortly.
Our biggest problem now after the initial worry that it would spread up here, is how to sell our spring crop of lambs. Keeping rare breeds, we have only a small number of dedicated rare breeds sales around the country where we can hope to get any sort of dignified price for our stock.  We (same for all other rare breed folk I think)  usually divide our lamb crop up so we sell about half a dozen lambs and perhaps a couple of shearlings at each sale - a trailerful.  Our local sale was due to be next week but that will certainly be cancelled, the Carlisle sale in a month's time has also been cancelled but could possibly be rescheduled if the movement ban is lifted, and we are waiting to hear about York and Oban in October - fingers crossed all will be calm by then.  If we cannot sell stock, and every breeder is in the same situation, then we shall have to overwinter them all, or kill off pefectly good breeding stock.  After the floods, hay is selling at ridiculously high prices - ours has lain soaked for the last few days, but the sun is shining today, so perhaps we have a chance of getting at least some of it in.
The follow-on problems to the whole industry will be immense.  In Britain we have some of the highest standards of animal husbandry in the world, but this means our prices are necessarily high so we have enormous competition from countries which have lower standards (some of which have endemic diseases such as F&M) and imports from those countries will continue both to Britain and to our usual markets.  Rebuilding those markets has taken the last few years - we just hope they can recover from this set-back.
If you are interested, look on www.defra.gov.uk which is the official website for agriculture in England.  My brain is too full at the moment to be able to remember the web for the Scottish equivalent, SEERAD. DEFRA update their site every few hours at the moment.
We never forget that F&M is quite a minor illness for livestock ; the massive culls of 2001 were supposedly for the sake of the industry itself, to prevent financial losses while farmers cared for their ill animals...........that's another sleeping dragon - leave her undisturbed !
Thank you for asking
Juliet in Scotland
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