Food for Thought

What is interesting - actually make that infuriating - about this new foot-and-mouth outbreak is how a procession of 'experts' are being wheeled out to claim that it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for intensive farming.

This makes me angry for a number of reasons. For a start, these people seem to tar the whole UK industry with a brush that frankly I don't think exists. OK, I admit the poultry industry can get pretty 'intensive' but how do you apply that description to a field full of suckler cows or even a spacious shed full of beef cattle?

The livestock industry may have moved on from the days when you had 20 cows and a pig at the bottom of the garden. But some people seem convinced that farmers have embraced the dark side when it comes to animal husbandry. As someone who works in the industry and regularly visits farms, I suggest that it is mostly fantasy.

The second point that irritates me is the suggestion that foot-and-mouth wouldn't happen in more extensive systems. An infectious disease is an infectious disease. Animals aren't protected from it because they are reared with a bit more space. Have these people forgotten that the worst affected county in 2001 was Cumbria - a place of rolling hills and sheep grazing over vast tracts of land.

I can accept that livestock movements - of which there are certainly far more than there were 50 years ago - do make disease control much more difficult. But the rest, as far as I can see, is rubbish.