I reproduce for you here what I wrote when a farm in the next parish to ours had a breakdown after bringing a bull in, with a clean pre-movement test.
Most likely it *will* be an isolated case; thus far it hasn't got into our wildlife up here, so each incident has been due to an animal brought in from an area which has the disease.
When we heard the news, we started to enumerate the friends and neighbours of ours who would be affected by this.
A woman who farms to the West of us has some cattle on a field that is within the area. So now her home farm is TB1. She has Galloways and breeds Blue Greys (the Mule of the cattle world.) She sells cattle once a year, at the main Blue Grey sales at the end of October, in Newcastleton, in Scotland. She will now need every animal that's going to Newcastleton to be pre-movement tested. That perhaps does not sound like a very big thing. But hers is an 'outbye' farm, very extensive, the cattle roaming on the moorland (called 'fell' around here.) It is no small job to gather up the cattle and bring them home to the farm. Well of course, she has to gather them to select those for sale, so she will need to bring that gather forwards, and arrange for the vet to come and do the first part of the test at that time. She will then need to keep those cattle close to hand for three days and bring them in again for the second part of the test. And then wait for the results, then gather them again for the wagons to go to the sale. She will need helpers on each of these gathers, she has no permanent staff. Often, when needing helpers for the odd day's work, one just has to take the day or days that are offered; co-ordinating all of these activities, and with the vet and the wagon driver too, will be quite an undertaking. Of course I am sure her neighbours will be sympathetic to her situation and help out
And then, after all of that extra work, she will no doubt get significantly less for her beasts. A lot of farmers in a TB4 simply won't countenance buying an animal from a TB1. And anyone who does buy them, if in Scotland or other TB4, will need to arrange and pay for a post-movement test.
Her home farm is right next to land we rent. Now we don't actually think for a minute that any of her beasts will have been in contact with the disease, thankfully. But now the TB1 extends right up to our boundary.
A little further west is a retired farmer who keeps a few sheep on her smallholding. Occasionally she has more grass than her sheep can eat, and she asks us if we have any young cattle who could graze some of it down. Had it not been for me being so busy getting things ready for the Deb Robson workshops, I would by now have speaned the calves currently on my Jerseys, and sent them and a couple of others over to that ground. Well thank goodness for the workshops, because that land is in the next parish, so those beasts would've been on a TB1 now, and would've had to be tested clear before being brought home. Of course we shan't send them now, and she will have to find another way to use up her grass.
One of the two breeders of Whitebred Shorthorns does have some ground which is now in the TB1. We saw him a few days ago, and it seems that thankfully none of the Blue Greys he will be sending to Newcastleton were on that ground. In his case, his home farm will not be classified TB1, so he will not be impacted in the same way as our other neighbour.
A farm we usually buy a Texel tup from is within the newly TB1 area. This gives us a moral dilemma. Because we simply couldn't bear to have been the cause of so much disruption to our neighbours, we do go to extreme lengths to avoid any possibility of bringing the disease onto our farm. So we do not buy sheep from anywhere that isn't TB4. But of course we won't want to be adding to our friends' misfortune, and because we know the situation in this case we do know that the risk is infinitesimally small, so we probably will still buy a tup from them.
I assume there will be other folks who operate the same policy in terms of buying sheep. Perhaps only a small proportion, but I don't suppose we are the *only* ones.
So then another neighbour, who breeds good North of England Mule ewes, may find his business impacted. He may get less for his Mules this year.
Another neighbour has ground he is planning to sell. It abuts the ground next to us, which is now TB1. It is very likely that this ground will now fetch significantly less money. And that if it is bought by anyone with cattle, it could be someone who is not TB4 - and will be bringing their cattle onto that ground, which is right next to some of ours.
I could go on, but what I am trying to portray is the impact, from minor to significant, from operational to financial, that this event has had on every farm not just in the same parish as the outbreak but in the parishes around.
The only farmer getting compensation here is the one with the beast which tested positive, and only for the value of that animal.
So with those ripples, disrupting and costing the farms for 3 to 5 miles around, can anyone please explain to me why that first farmer felt the need to buy animals from a high risk area in the first place???
I completely understand that with rare breeds it isn't always possible to only buy from areas with as good or better health status than your own, so that sometimes there
is a good reason for bringing animals from a higher risk location. But, if you do have to do this, please do take that extra bit of care to ensure that no infection can disseminate, and keep the incomers well-separated until all checks are clear. If you are not required to do a post-movement TB test but the animals are coming from an area which has the disease, then I would say, and all the farmers in your area would say, please do the post-movement TB test anyway.