Bluetongue Virus - To Jab or not to Jab…. That is the question.

Something rather bizarre’s been happening over the past few days. The sun has emerged, and for a blissful weekend it actually shone upon the righteous. That is the annual Langdon Beck Sheep show, which not only managed to take place this year, but it was also bathed in warm sunshine.

This is a traditional show in the finest traditions of the Northern Hills. Two hundred sheep and a `Bouncy Castle’. What more do you need? These are uncertain times though. Disease is never far away, and this year’s `plague de jour’ is Bluetongue. Unlike the foot and mouth virus, which knocked last year’s show on the head, Bluetongue is primarily tackled using vaccination.

Langdon Beck Show

At least that’s what the veterinary authorities would like to happen. Farmers have other ideas though, and many of those I spoke to at Langdon Beck had only vaccinated the stock which would be sold at this autumn’s sales. Of course there’s little point in vaccinating the fat lambs which will be going to the slaughterhouse in the next few weeks, they’d be dead – at the hands of the slaughterman - by the time the vaccine could take effect. There is according to vets a case for vaccinating the breeding stock which is staying on the hills.

Many farmers argue that at this time of year it’s impossible to gather in all the animals from the fells because there’s too many, and anyway the weather’s starting to get colder. Remember this is `Nine months of winter and three months of bad weather’ country. A lot of the farms take the view that the `vector-free’ period when the midges which carry the virus stop flying – and even die off, will be here quite soon.

The vets aren’t so sure and told me that a `Indian Summer’ could carry quite a risk of the disease re-emerging. There’s also a rumour circulating amongst the farmers that the vaccine can cause fertility problems amongst the ewes. Vets dismiss this saying the vaccine’s dead not live so there shouldn’t be any issues with it. Also there’s the cost. At fifty pence a dose, that can add up to more than a hundred pounds for even a small upland farm. But as one of the local vets told me that’s peanuts compared with the cost of treating even a couple of sheep which get the disease.

Sun shines on Countryside jamboree after last year's washout.

Sometimes it feels like there can be too much of a good thing, and at this year's CLA Game Fair at Blenheim Palace there was almost too much sun. Farmers will be absolutely delighted to see the sun shine on their crops, and the Game Fair organisers will heave a sigh of relief that this year's event fared better than last year when the soggy ground at Harewood House in Leeds meant a last minute cancellation. This year the sun shone from day one, as a hundred and fifty thousand people flocked through the gates. The Game Fair is a bit different to other countryside events, for a start there is no livestock, so it has survived the various outbreaks of animal disease in the past few years, and partly because of this it is one of the few countryside events on the summer calendar where dogs are welcome. The Royal Highland is one of the few shows with livestock which allows dogs. The reason given by most show organisers where dogs are banned is our old friend 'elf and safety', with worries that should the pouch slip the lead it could cause livestock to panic, resulting in visitors being hurt. At the Game Fair the blazing heat of the weekend this made the doggy water stops with their bowls and hoses more than welcome.

Amongst the hundred and fifty thousand visitors were the Farm Minister Lord Rooker and the Conservative leader David Cameron who is also a local MP.

The Game Fair is always a good place for unveiling policies; in the past the CLA has used it to launch a campaign to get restaurants to reveal where their beef comes from, this year it was the turn of the anglers. Perhaps feeling a little left behind the publicity generated by Hunting and Shooting, several of the organisations representing the four million people who indulge in Britain’s most popular pastime, are to merge to give a stronger voice to those who fish for pleasure. Several debates were held at the Game Fair about the proposal.

Those behind the move deny it’s out of fear that after the ban on hunting, fishing will be the next target for animal rights campaigners. This is more about getting their voice heard in government circles. In particular anglers feel they want more done to improve the aquatic environment in return for the money they pay for their rod licence. They want improvements to water quantity as well as water quality. This for instance would mean changes to the way that houses are built and the planning system to ensure that surface drainage from new developments is free of the pollutants which could damage fish… things like heavy metals, solvents and fats.

The merger of the Angling Conservation Society, the National Federation of Anglers, the National Federation of Sea Anglers, the Specialist Anglers Alliance and the National Association of Fisheries and Angling Consultatives is likely to get the support of those involved in the sport. Infact these different bodies have been mulling over the idea of merging for almost a century. Now it looks likely to happen. A final name for the new body is yet to be decided, but for the moment the campaign goes under the banner of Angling Unity. Could I suggest `Worm Drowners Inc?’

It’s showtime…..

There was book I once never bothered to read called `God is an Englishman’ by R.F.Delderfield…who also wrote `To Serve Them All My Days’, well actually the almighty is a Yorkshire man… or woman.

Last year’s Royal Show at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire was a washout…. So much so that the final day had to be cancelled to the public because the conditions under foot were just too dangerous and boggy.

By contrast the Great Yorkshire, no need for royalty in the name here….Great will suffice, was bathed in sunshine. This year the Royal was hit by reduced numbers of animals and slightly disappointing visitor numbers. The first day of the Great Yorkshire, celebrating its hundred and fiftieth birthday ended with throngs of people, and bathed in glorious evening sunshine, even if the weather was a bit iffy earlier in the day. I suspect this might have been instigated by the posse of bishops I passed as I was walking into the showground.

Farming is very much an isolated business. Long, and physically demanding days spent either trying to cox machinery back to life or attempting the same with sheep. Very few forage harvesters have an overwhelming desire to turn their toes up. With the decline of auction marts, and indeed livestock farming, there's little opportunity to socialise. Trade shows, are one way of getting to meet those of a like mind, but the highlight of the short summer hiatus before the harvest begins is the traditional agricultural show. They're also an opportunity to gain the approval, and admiration of your peers.

At the heart of every show there is the competition, whether it's the big national shows like the Royal, or the regional ones like the Great Yorkshire and the East of England. These competitions, the classes, the best in show matter. The animals entered are gliding along in the fast lane of the gene pool. This is the stock that all the most dedicated farmers want for their blood lines. A Win at the Royal, or the Great Yorkshire can be worth thousands of pounds, not in the relatively small prize money on offer, but in the resale value in the semen or the embryos of the cattle, or the sale of the sheep or pigs themselves.

Then there's the chance to press the flesh. The big movers and shakers in farming must be seen at the shows. NFU President Ptere Kendall was one of the visitors on the first day of the Great Yorkshire, Hilary Benn will be there in the Thursday, as will be the Queen... no doubt he'll get much more of an ear-bending about badgers than she will.

NFU President Peter Kendall at the 2008 Great Yorkshire Show

It's the chance for those who lobby on behalf of farming to test the water, to get a feel of what the countryside is really thinking. Some farmers prefer to avoid the general shows, prefering instead the specialist trade events, but for others events like the Great Yorkshire are a vital social lifeline which keeps them just the right side of the line between hope and despair.

Making hay, if the sun shines.

It’s a new variation on scratch’n’sniff. Four Hessian sacks full of grass, and you have to pick the one you’d offer to the sheep whose heart you’d like to win. I picked the one which was made from lowland grass in an improved meadow.

The trouble is that in this context the term improved is roughly the same as applied to improvements in train timetables. All the flowers had been abolished as a necessary step towards a more efficient nutritional enhancement of the lives of sheep. In other words it does the job, but lacks soul.

The four bags of hay were part of an exhibition at St John’s Chapel in Weardale on the History of Hay-Time, along with some rather barbaric looking instruments, which preceeded the days of tractors, and, lots of pictures of Edwardian haymakers looking seriously over-dressed.

It’s Hay Time in Teesdale, well almost. Just a few weeks to go and the stunning carpet of colours which make this landscape so spectacular at this time of year will have been cut, turned, dried and baled into a food-store for winter. Weather permitting that is.

The North Pennines has a patchwork of flower rich hay meadows which are rare in the British Countryside these days. When it comes to the most valuable `species rich’ examples, there is just two thousand acres of them left in the whole of the UK.

And these meadows are a haven for some of the rarest plants in the land, such as Eyebright, Great Burnet, Bistort and Pignut and Lady’s Mantle. All of these were to be found in a field I visited with John O’Reilly from the Haytime project which is run by the North Pennine Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty team, think of an AONB as a sort of National Park `lite’. This gently sloping field close to the River Tees is a treasure trove of rare, precious and largely unspectacular looking plants which grow here and in very few other places.

The grass and the flowers grow here because the farmer is paid to take his sheep and cattle off this land at the end of March. The flowers, and the grass is then untroubled by teeth for at least three months before it is harvested. By the beginning of June, yellow, white, mauve and green jostle for the eye’s attention. By the end of July it’s gone, felled, and left on the ground to dry, being every day to make sure that happens.

But nothing ever goes smoothly in farming, and the curse of haytime is rain. Hay, as opposed to Silage is a dry feed. If it’s wet when it’s baled it can go rotten and could make the animals which eat it ill. So at the end of June and into July the farmers pray for sunshine, and have to move fast before it disappears, hence the old saying making hay while the sun shines.

Last year the North Pennines escaped lightly when the skies unleashed a torrent of water on rural England. However it seriously disrupted the haymaking. The result is that the farmers have to use other methods of preserving the food. Silage is moist grass which is sealed into either silos or wrapped in plastic, where it ferments; producing acid which `pickles’ the grass, and stops it rotting. Another variation in Haylage, a relatively recent innovation where grass with a moisture content of about 50%, as opposed to about 20% for Hay, is wrapped in plastic and partially ferments.

Anyway, what makes hay really important for conservationists and botanists is that in an ideal world, as the grass and the cut flowers lay on the ground drying out, seeds are released as the hay is turned, thus refreshing the meadows.

Infact in some places, hay from flower rich meadows is brought to `improved’ land and dried there in an effort to `un-improve’ or restore these fields.

So valuable are these hay meadows considered by conservationists that they lobbied long and hard for the government to introduce a system to pay farmers to manage them for conservation.

In 1987 Environmentally Sensitive Area Payments were introduced to stop the loss of these habitats. Under the agreements farmers were required to remove their livestock from these fields by the end of March, the meadows could not be cut until the end of July, and artificial fertiliser was banned.

Although the schemes went some way to revitalising the upland meadows, farmers found them inflexible and the ESA agreements are now coming to an end. They are to be replaced by what it so endearingly called the Higher Level Scheme. The idea is that you, the farmer, draw up a series of nature conservation measures, and you agree them with Natural England who will then pay you money for implementing them. The first problem, which has apparently now been solved was that there wasn’t nearly enough money to fund the same level of conservation as before under the old ESA payments.

Now the difficulty lies with staffing. Because all of these `Higher Level’ agreements are individually tailored to each farm, the staff input is much higher, and there aren’t enough staff to go around. There is a real fear amongst those trying to halt the decline of hay meadows that farmers will find they have to wait to get onto the scheme, whilst they’re losing money on unproductive meadows which stand empty of stock for long periods of time, and go back to the old flower-free ways.

The worry is that if the species rich hay meadows are lost, they’re lost for good.

Time to take that woolly jumper off

It’s the hottest day of the year so far, officially today has been declared summer. But if you’re a sheep then life can be pretty hellish if you haven’t had your short back and sides…

This is the time of year strapping lads pose the usual question of ….`Been anywhere nice on your holidays then…’ to a succession of ladies, and a few gentleman who pass through their impromptu salons.

The trouble is that there aren’t really enough of these ovine barbers to go around, and any farmer who finds a good reliable contract shearer is best advised to treat them with love and care, to cherish them.

Like so many jobs on the land shearing isn’t that well paid… unless you’re really fast at it. But you have to be fast and careful, it’s bad form to remove the leg of lamb whilst the sheep still needs to use it. But even then the pay is only about £1.25 per animal and you have to do about 30 an hour to make decent money.

Traditionally much of the work has been done by gangs of New Zealanders, but since some sections of the tabloid press declared that all foreigners are bad, and all they want to do is come over here stealing our women, taking our jobs, and destroy our culture, HMG has been getting sniffy about Johnny Foreigner doing just that. Last year infact there was a proposal to increase the paperwork burden on these peripatetic `wool-dressers', although fortunately the government saw sense and withdrew the plan. Hostility to migrant workers is having an impact on farming, and especially food production.

The result is that crops go unpicked, as those who can come here without limit…i.e. the Poles and the Hungarians find they can now earn much better money at home, don’t have to leave their families and don’t have to live in a dilapidated caravan in the arse end of Herefordshire for months on end, and have a friendlier welcome from the locals.

Meanwhile with the pound crashing through the floor compared with other currencies a summer spent in Britain relieving pommie sheep of their wool isn’t that attractive, and there are precious few UK youngsters who fancy this backbreaking work.

So there’s a major drive by the British Wool Marketing Board to get home-grown talent trained up. As farmers get older and their offspring are exploring less arduous lines of work, the situation’s getting pretty urgent.

When the sun’s out you can just take your jumper off…. If you're a sheep, that’s not an option… you have to get someone to do it for you, otherwise you’ll just have to find a shady tree to sit under, and hope that the flies don’t attack you and lay their eggs in your wool and give you sheep scab.