The paperwork got worse
Posted: Friday 9 January, 2015
Aaaarrgh! In the previous post, I recounted finding some paperwork that required my attention, during a festive clear out / tidy up. I thought it would be simple. Ha.
We have some rented seasonal grazing about 4 miles away; in terms of animal movements, if certain conditions are met, you can get a concession to link these seasonal grazings to your own main holding and you don't have to then notify the authorities every time you move stock between them. I did this in February 2013. What I didn't notice was that, for cattle, you have to renew the linking very year - the link lasts for 364 days.
This isn't the case for sheep where the link is permanent and you get a flock number for each location - any lambs born at one of the grazings would have to be tagged with the flock number for the holding of birth. For cattle, all calves born in the herd, regardless of which holding they're born on get the same herd numeber on their tags. No-one tells you this btw - and wouldn't it be simpler if it was the same for all types of livestock?
Anyway, I contacted BCMS (British Cattle Movement Service) to tell them that the link should have remained in place from February 2014 until present and could they update their records please. I got a prompt and very nice response saying no, they couldn't do that but they would activate the link from 5th January 2015 (the date they got my email) to 4th January 2016. However, that meant I had to put all movements of cattle between the two holdings during the period of February 2014 and January 2015 into the CTS Online and update all the individual passports. Feck.
CTS (Cattle Tracing System) Online is actually quite good but it didn't like backdated stuff, so I phoned them and the nice man said "put the movements in and email and we'll do it". So I did. Fortunately, there's a paper record that you have to maintain for movements so the information was all there - and we don't DO that many movements anyway.
Then I started to update the passports; ran out of space on three of them; found and printed continuation sheets then nearly ran out of barcode stickers. I've now ordered them and I'm *almost* sure that all is now up to date. I'll find out when the RPID folk come to inspect my records in March to make sure the three calves I claimed for under the Scottish Beef Scheme actually exist.
Needless to say, I have a note to self to update the link information beore 4th January 2016 :-)
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