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.

Pigs might fly....?

For as long as I can remember farmers have complained that they are ill used by the people they supply, whether it's the supermarkets, the processors, the wholesalers. Farmers are and have been under-valued by just about everybody. In many ways they have had some justification for this, and although at times it might seem like synchronised whingeing, it has to be said that the retail environment is very competitive... cut throat perhaps. The main purpose in life of the supermarket buyer is to get the produce his or her bosses sell... from the field to the checkout with the greatest possible profit, or margin possible.

This is what buyers do, this is what supermarkets do... it's capitalism. This would be all fine and dandy if it had been a relationship of equals. It isn't though. The retail sector is dominated by about four major players, with Tesco in the lead, followed, by varying degrees of proximity by Sainsburys, ASDA, Morrison and some of the smaller rivals like the Co-op, Waitrose and in the bargain basement Aldi and Lidl. There isn't a huge scope for choice and it's getting narrower. The Co-op recently swallowed rivals Somerfield.

In the past farmers allege that the supermarkets have had an unfair advantage because farmers haven't had anywhere else to go. But there has been a change, a correction in the balance. Perhaps one of the turning points for this has been the change to the subsidy system which brought an end to the payment of subsidies....sorry support payments..... to farmers according to how much food they produce, but according to the area of land they manage.

This has removed for instance the necessity for farmers to produce a crop on every field. This was the whole idea of the reform of the common agricultural policy. Farmers wouldn't produce every bit of food the can, they would instead produce only what they could sell to the market.

In the case of farmers in England, a range of about a dozen different payments linked to the area they cropped, or the number of animals they have in their fields, was rolled into on Single Farm Payment. Off course the combination of a payment based on the area of land farmed, and a complex computer system to administer that new system was a recipe for disaster, and a cock-up of biblical proportions ensued. That was then, and after a couple of years of chaos, the system has now calmed down a bit.

Throw into the mix a genuine contraction is some sectors, for instance a sizable number of pigs seem to have been lost from production in Holland and Denmark, as has happened here. UK Pig numbers have fallen from over eight hundred breeding sows in 1999 to about four hundred and fifty thousand now... and you have the makings of a shortage of supply.

In the `Good?' old days, all the processors and supermarkets had to do was to wave the `import' stick to get UK prices tumbling. That isn't possible now, and there has been something of a change on the part of consumers. Shoppers now want to see the `Union Flag' on their packets of bacon. The net result is that even if retailers and processors wanted to squeeze the UK farmer, these days when it comes to pigs their options are somewhat limited. The result of this is that the price of meat at the checkout has increased by over 17% according to the latest Consumer Prices index from the Office of National Statistics. Bad news for the Treasury and the Governor of the Bank of England who is now having to write letters of explanation to the Chancellor, explaining why inflation has gone above 2%, so often now that a fresh stationary order will be required.

In the case of Beef, this is complicated even further by the growing affluence of countries in the Far East. There has been a massive increase in demand for instance from China and South Korea, combined with drought problems in Australia, this has increased the demand for UK beef exports. This very interesting graph of prices shows the massive increase in both beef and pig prices year on year. The jump in the price of lamb is more measured. This is partly due to the fact that demand is more sedate, and supply has remained high since the problems with Foot and Mouth disease in 2007. However there could be a price increase next year, after research from the Scottish Agricultural College discovered that there has been a fall in sheep numbers in the Highlands. The other bluebottle buzzing around the ointment is cost. Over the past year there has been a massive rise in all manner of inputs, from oil, to soya, to wheat and barley. Some of those have now stabilised or even come down (wheat and oil)... but other continue to go up. In a way this year's poor harvest conditions may have helped livestock farmers. because so much milling wheat is of poor quality it will have to be sold as animal feed. This will mean the price of feed based on wheat could well fall... See once again the `Farmer's Weekly' graphs.

All of this leaves farmers in an unusual positioin of power. The retailers are desperate to compete with each other on price, but squeezing suppliers isn't an option. In the case of beef the meat could simply end up going elsewhere. The ready supply of Brazilian beef which used to be used as a weapon to keep the price of the domestic product down is bogged down inthe fallout from their foot and mouth problems, and in that sense beef farmers really do have the option to have a much greater influence over the price. Many farmers are reluctant to excercise this muscle as the good times, such as they are, may not last. Many a combine harvester bought in the wake of last year's bumper crop has lain idle this year as the heaven opened.

The bottom line for farmers is profitability, and whether that can be sustained. Lats year pig farmers were losing about £25 per animal. This year it's a profit of £8 per pig. The big question they're all asking if whether that will be enough to re-invest in buildings and equipment, or whether their hand-to-mouth existence will continue to keep their farms on the edge of viability. In other words `Will pigs fly?'

Why sprouts are bad for you.

Basic facts:-

1) Cereal crops are grown because of the cereals they produce.
2) The cereals they produce are seeds
3) Put seeds into the ground and they grow.

All in all this has been a miserable summer, although the floods haven’t reached the same biblical proportions that they did last year, fields don’t need to be knee deep in water to bugger up the harvest.The problem this year has been a steady stream or rather showers of rain. Just enough to keep the ground soggy enough to prevent the machinery getting into the fields to harvest the crops. In technical terms it’s too wet for the machinery to `travel’.

And the grain’s wet too. This causes two problems, first of all the wet grain which is harvested has to be dried. Basically the farmers measure the moisture content when it comes in from the fields, and for it to be sellable it has to be reduced to about 15%.

This drying is done by putting it through a grain dryer.... a big cylindrical vat through which hot air heated by propane is pumped. Given the price of gas, which is currently at 34p per litre, this adds about £20 per ton to the cost of getting wheat to the point at which it can be sold.

Also most of this wheat is only suitable for animal feed, rather than bread or biscuit making, so that reduces the price to the farmer by about a further £40 per ton.....

The other big difficulty caused, both by the wet, and by not being able to get the crop in, is the danger of sprouting. This is where the ears of the wheat or any cereal crop fall to the ground and the grain, which is a seed, starts to grow again. The grain is largely useless, and because it has sprouted almost impossible to get back. In most cases where there are patched which have sprouted they just have to be left to be ploughed back in or `spayed off’ and killed with herbicide. The loss amounts to hundreds of pounds per field.

`The grass-like green shoots in this field is part of the crop which has sprouted'

However the biggest problem for many farmers at the moment is being able to get onto their land to put in next year's crop. The oilseed rape should be going in about now, and some of the farmers I've spoken to say they simply won't make the deadline. This is a nightmare for farmers because most have already bought, and will have to pay for, the seed, the fertilizer and the fuel to plant next year’s crop. In some cases they’ll be looking at less valuable crops like beans to fill the rotation gap left by a lack of oilseed rape

This year the harvest is a bleak payday on the land. Where they can farmers will write this one off to experience and get on with the job of trying to salvage what they can from a dismal summer.

Distressing times for Damsons

There is a small corner of Cumbria which is at the heart of a fruit growing tradition stretching back two thousand years. The Damson was probably introduced to this country by the Romans. It's a type of plum which is especially prolific in the former territories of Westmorland, annexed by neighbouring Cumberland in 1974 under the rule of Heath the merciless.

The Lyth valley, which rather unusually runs from the south to the north, rather than east-west stretching up from Morecambe Bay into the Lake District, is one of the biggest damson producing areas in the country. In April the trees, and there are hundreds of them both in the hedgerows and in orchards attached to many of the local farms, are white with blossom. Damson Day is a celebration of this blossom held towards the end of the month.

The crop of fruit is normally harvested towards the end of August and into September. This year however it's a washout. According to the Westmorland Damson Association, which exists to promote the use of this fruit the harvest is down by about eighty percent. The trees, have to quote Helen Smith the secretary of the association, `had enough'.

They were assailed by fierce easterly winds in the spring when the blossom was forming, this icy blast put the pollinating insects off pollinating. The blossom was blown off the trees and the fruit failed to form properly.

The result is trees which are are literally aging before their time, or at least they are putting on their winter clothes long before they should. The leaves are already turning yellow and some of the fruit which has actually made it onto the tree is small and shrivelled.

The prematurely yellow leaves are clearly visible on this tree

This is a bad year but it isn't a disaster, yet. There is a Cumbrian damson mountain, not yet on the scale of Europe's butter mountain in the nineteen seventies. In freezers in several location across Cumbria and North Lancashire with much of last year's harvest. Quite a lot of this was bought by the Westmorland Damson Association as a part of their policy of ensuring that in the good years like 2007, enough is stored away for the lean years like this one.

What would really hurt would be if this years freezing east winds returned next spring. Those who use damsons for jam, gin, pies and sausages will probably be OK for now, but would struggle to survive a second barren year. These Damson famines happen from time to time, but climate change watchers will watch with interest to see if this becomes a trend.

Farmers bogged down as harvest stalls

It's August. It shouldn't be the month when the farmer showing you his crops warns you to watch out for yet another nasty puddle. Fields about to be harvested shouldn't require wellies. If anything this should be be the season for dust masks. This should have been a bumper harvest, but in parts of the country farmers are facing losing some or all of their crops to the miserable wet weather which has plagued this us this summer. Normally the Northumberland Coastal Plain is one of the top areas in the country for growing wheat and oilseed rape. Glen Sanderson (above) who farms near Morpeth should be in the middle of a bumper harvest. Last year he had one of the best years ever, and until a few weeks ago he was hoping for the same, now he's just hoping that the rain will hold off long enough to be able to get some of his crops in.

By now the barley harvest should be finished, oilseed rape should be started, and the wheat should be ripening nicely ready for the combines in the final week of August. The harvest is later here in the North than elsewhere, but it's good land and on a good year yields can match anything else in the country. The problem is getting the crops out of the fields. The oilseed rape was ready last week, but it was too late to harvest. The problem is that ground is too damp for the machinery, and the danger is that the crop could start `chitting' or sprouting. The oilseed rape seeds, from which the oil itself is extracted are tiny, and black, contained in slim pea-like pods. Those pods are now quite brittle and Glen Sanderson's worried that even a medium strength wind could blow them open and spill the precious seeds across the soggy earth.

The loss of this crop would mean thousands of pounds down the drain. To grow it it costs about a hundred and fifty pounds an acre, and with prices paid to farmers now falling the chances of making a profit on fields like this are fast receding. The wheat field down the road tells a similar story. The wheat stands proud and strong, but the grain in the ears turn to mush without much pressure between the fingers. It can be dried at a cost of about £20 per ton, but a lot of the quality is lost, which means that it's now only suitable for distilling into alcoholic drinks, or for feeding to animals. The money is in what's called `Milling' wheat. This field would normally find its way into the biscuit tin, but not this year. This means a loss of £20 a ton, and about £100 per acre.Some farmers have decided not to plant next year, saying the cost of fertilizer is too high to make crops viable, and it's better to farm nothing and collect the Single Farm Payment. The price of fertilizer has doubled in the past year, closely linked to the oil price. Glen Sanderson is more determined, declaring that farmers in the North and Scotland are tough, although maybe stupid to try growing anything in this climate, and he's determined, he'll be back again next year.

The Credit Crunch...Crisis or Opportunity for farmers?

It was an ill wind which was certainly blowing through Northumberland at the weekend! The rain which battered the farmers market at Hexham was relentless, and the mood could well have been just as depressed. These are not easy times for the food industry, a recent report from the consultants Price Waterhouse Cooper predicted that up to a third of people will cut the amount they spend on food by moving their shopping to a cheaper supermarket, and nearly half could cut costs by eating at home rather than eating out.

The first of those two propositions is now good news for farmers markets like Hexham, the second could be the silver lining in the cloud which was unleashing a flood of biblical proportions on the poor shoppers on Saturday. Some farmer producers think that they will actually be the beneficiaries of a shift towards home cooking. People can buy very good ingredients to cook themselves for half the price of a meal out.

While I was at Hexham I bought two organic sirloin streaks from Askerton Castle Estate which came to thirteen pounds. With vegetables, from Bluebell Organics and a few other bits and pieces the entire meal cam to about sixteen pounds. The equivalent, eaten out would have been forty pounds, at the very least, and there would be no guarantee that the steak would have been as good...or even the knowledge of where it came from and what kind of animal it was from. In this case Belted Galloway, which is in my somewhat amateurish opinion, one of the best looking and tastiest of our traditional breeds.

Another farmer who runs an organic milk business near Darlington, Gordon Tweddle at Acorn Dairy, says that despite having to increase his prices to consumers, business has held up very well. The key says Gordon is to talk to your customers, and explain why it is that you have to increase your prices. Basically people are sensible enough to know that if they want to have milk from animals of whose provenance they can be certain, and if they want local food, they will understand that this is the only way such food can survive.

These are not easy times for any farmer, especially those who are dependent on buying in feed....but as the co-ordinator at Hexham Farmers Market pointed out to me... if you're sourcing local ingredients, and you're selling just a couple of miles away from where you bake your bread, then your costs from Diesel, and distribution don't rise at the same rate as the supermarkets with whom you're competing, and so you stand a fighting chance of surviving.

The good news, I suspect, is that many of the people who regularly use farmers markets like the one at Hexham won't be hit by the credit crunch, because they don't have any credit. My suspicion is that many of the people who buy their food in this way actually own their homes outright, and many live of interest-rate related incomes, and might actually benefit from a rate rise.

Poultry slaughter under the spotlight.

This week has been much exercised by chickens. Not how they live or are farmed... rain forests of newsprint and many terabytes of digital space has been taken up with that recently, but how they die. Following a very high profile campaign by the TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall there has been a significant increase in sales of free range birds in supermarkets.

You might remember that Mr Fearnely Whittingstall set up his own experiment where he kept one flock of birds in a shed, and another flock in free range conditions and compared the kind of lives the two birds had. One thing which perhaps passed unoticed, although it was mentioned in the programme, was that at the end of their lives the chickens, both fee range and shed reared, or broilers, met the same end at the same slaughter plant.

Now questions are being asked about whether the slaughtering process is as humane as it could be. If you're squeamish please look away now. This is how it works... The birds normally arrive at the slaughterhouse in crates, from which they are unloaded. They are then placed upside down into shackles from which they hang by their feet. These shackles move along a conveyor, in a fashion which is not dissimilar to a car plant. Upside down, their head is immersed in an electrified water bath. The chicken completes an electrical circuit; a massive current is designed to render the bird unconscious.

One of the concerns is whether this always happens, and whether some of the birds are only partially stunned, and maybe still conscious when they move to the next stage of the process which is where their throats are cut by a machine with a series of rotating knives. Death under this method actually occurs through bleeding.

The Farm Animal Welfare Council which advises the government has been carrying out an inquiry into the way that white meat species are slaughtered, and the first conclusions of the working group chaired by Professor David Henderson have started to emerge. According to Compassion in World Farming which was present at an open meeting addressed by Prof Henderson, there are worries both about the shackling and about the way that the electrical water stunning baths actually work, or sometimes don’t.

The worry which CIWF has about the shackling is that in some plants, according to them, the birds can spend several minutes in an unnatural position upside down before they are stunned. According to the lobby group this can be worse in some of the larger plants where up to a hundred birds a minute are killed and the actual killing lines can wind around the plant before the birds are stunned. CIWF says that not only is, being held upside down by their feet an unnatural position for the birds to be held, it can also be very painful as it can exacerbate leg and foot problems which may have been caused by the way they were reared.

There are also worries about whether every bird receives enough current to properly stun it. Every chicken is different, in size and electrical resistance, and this may effect how much current it gets. CIWF also says that sometimes by flapping their wings the wingtips of the birds actually hit the electrified water first, something which according to `Compassion' is very painful, and causes them to recoil their necks thus missing the stunning bath.

An alternative to electrical stunning is the use of gas. This is used to kill the birds, and renders the unconscious in the process. This isn’t a poison as we would think of it, but an inert gas such as Nitrogen or Argon which simply deprives the bird of oxygen. Dr Mohan Raj of Bristol University told me that when Michael Portillo, the former politician turned TV presenter made a programme about `How to kill a human’ hypoxia, or the deprivation of the brain of oxygen was probably the least unpleasant way to die!

This is in effect what is happening with gassing. The birds are put into a chamber which is then pumped full of either pure argon or pure nitrogen, which is, for the purposes of killing considered inert. A mixture of thirty percent Carbon Dioxide and either Nitrogen or Argon may also be used. The birds are deprived of oxygen and die. When they are unconscious, and the brain ceases to operate, they will continue to move, thrash around even, but this is purely a nerve response, according to scientists, the same as cutting the head off a chicken. One advantage of this system is that the birds can be killed without having to be removed from the crates in which they arrived at the plant.
There is some concern though within the industry that in the process of this automatic response, the birds can damage their wings, and this can reduce the value of the carcass. However the bigger stumbling block to the widespread use of gassing is the capital cost of the equipment, something in the region of hundreds of thousands of pounds to replace the existing lines. Fine if those lines are life expired, but beyond the reach of companies using lines with many years of life left. The change is happening though, and about a quarter of chickens, and most turkeys killed for food in the country are now gassed.

It will be interesting to see whether the concerns about how chicken live will be duplicated when the FAWC report is published this autumn looking at how they die. One problem is that by looking at the label it’s now easy to see how a chicken lived its life. It’s almost impossible to know how it met its end.