I used to think I was quite good at predicting the outcome of our TB tests. I don’t claim these predictions were based on any scientific knowledge, rather they were wet finger in the air, hunch sort of stuff.
The one thing I can say is that hunches are unreliable. When lesions were found in a cull cow at the abattoir last July, I thought this was only a blip and my hunch told me we would pass our whole herd test in October. We had six reactors. Six is serious and so I discussed that there would be more bad news at our next test
in January, but, to my amazement, we passed.
Plenty of TB exists around here, so I thought at our test in March we would be bound to fail, but we passed that too. I’ve stopped listening to my hunches now and will go with whatever happens in future, but the important thing is we are now considered clear.
Maintaining numbers
We were, as I told readers last time, very short of cows, so we have bought in calf heifers. They are not at our preferred calving date when you get them. We bought more than we needed, but we should not be caught short of numbers again, unless we suffer a really big TB hit. Half of these were in calf to sexed semen, so now we have extra heifer calves on the ground and we should be okay for replacement heifers in two years’ time. With the prospect of a TB breakdown always there, you have to plan ahead to mitigate the consequences. Doing this incurs a cost and I am left feeling I shouldn’t have to take these precautions, but we are
where we are and have no choice but to make the best of it.
The best part of being clear is we can once again sell calves. It takes a while to make inroads to their numbers, but they are getting fewer. Some of them are at a sort of halfway stage in their growth – they are not baby calves and neither are they weanlings of six months old. I don’t think we will make a penny on them, but at least we kept them alive. I’ve been saying for a long time I thought TB around here was getting worse, this was probably one of my hunches, but I was right.
Conformation of this comes from my vet in his newsletter when he said TB in this area is as bad now as it has been for years. There are meetings going on to try
to get this area into a badger cull. It could easily drive me to despair, if I let it. Surely the time to have a cull was two to three years ago, not wait until the situation was allowed to get into the bad place it is in now. I’ve been saying that for long enough as well. It’s all so reactive.
Organic farming
We became fully organic in July last year, which means we have been farming organically for about three years. We don’t come at it as organic purists, but rather as an opportunity to add value to what we do. We intend to sell about the same quantity of milk, but hope the milk will be worth more. Also, if we are to attract Government support post-Brexit, we see organic farming as likely to meet the criteria of doing public good, of enhancing the environment, being sustainable – in
other words, ticking all the boxes we are told taxpayers will accept if they are to continue supporting farming.
We don’t feel any remorse that our decision to go organic was driven by commercial possibilities; if you want to effect change for the better (and organic farming is largely seen as a change for the better), then meaningful change is always driven by cash. That is why so much of our energy comes from wind and the
sun. At some time the tariffs must have been so lucrative they attracted huge investments. I’m not so sure about the long-term effects of buying all this wood chip; they seem to be buying it faster than it will grow.
A big plus also is that we actually enjoy farming organically. We still have a lot to learn – for example, we have a field with lots of docks, and that is a real challenge, docks are the biggest single threat to organic farming. An irony always exists, and many years ago we decided we would like to go organic. The
regulatory body sent an organic farmer along to see us to appraise our suitability and some of the things he told us we had to do were so ridiculous all he did was put us off for years. But, in spite of him, we got there in the end.
TB has delayed the perceived advantages of selling organic milk by nearly a year. We buy organic milk for use in the house. For more than 50 years we used our own unpasteurised milk and reared a family on it. We’re afraid to use it now in case it has TB in it, which it easily could have. There’s progress for you. Sometimes my wife returns from her weekly shop and says “there was no organic milk to be had today”. I see that as a plus because the farming press tells me there is too much conventional milk about this spring – and I am selling into a market that apparently clears the shelves.
Antibiotic-free
We are hardly into organic milk production, but already we need to plan where to go next. I see the next logical step to be a move to being antibiotic-free. It will get acres of free publicity on the back of the issue of antibiotic resistance in humans. We need to be careful welfare issues don’t come along the way; your animals need to be in a good place, health wise, before you start out.
Years ago, I used to go to a lot of organic meetings to represent the coop I was with, which had a lot of organic farmers, but I couldn’t get them to go to meetings. Welfare issues existed at the time because the first inclination of an organic farmer, if he had a sick animal, was to reach for a homeopathic
solution. That is not a debate I want to get into here other than to say if an animal is acutely ill it needs treating promptly and, as far as I can see, homeopathy is not quick. I think animals will adjust over a few generations to this antibiotic-free regime. Animals soon adjusted in New Zealand, for example, when large herds
and flocks had to survive with less involved care. It sounds a bit hard I know, but if an animal couldn’t cope it didn’t get bred from and a natural selection process took place. We will get the same here; some won’t like it and, as we go down that road, culling rates will escalate. But you can’t have it both ways – you rarely can.
Leave a Reply