Foot-and-mouth 10 years on

"Foot and mouth marked the nadir of the fortunes of farming - that was the worst it ever got. People were deeply traumatised and some wounds will never heal.

"But things have got better since. It lifted the lid on what was happening in farming - good and bad - and allowed us to deal with the bad and build on the good. It started the process of reconnecting town and country, giving the local food movement huge impetus.

"The contingency plan was outdated. The biggest tragedy was the contiguous cull [which saw farms adjacent to infected units culled out regardless of whether the animals carried the disease]. One lesson we haven't learnt is that prevention is better than cure. There is still a lot of the disease around and we're not taking any more precautions to keep it out than we were in 2001."

"The crisis was hellish and draining, but lessons were not learned from the 2001 outbreak. It is particularly disappointing that a devolved budget for animal health and disease control has not been forthcoming. It's a huge weakness and leaves Scotland vulnerable."

"Dumfriesshire itself has bounced back from the horror of burning pyres with resilience and confidence. Some people have changed the way they farmed, others got out altogether and some just rebuilt their herds or flocks and got on with it. You're dealing with a very hardy group of people and they've moved on."

"A lot of farmers who were taken out by foot-and-mouth went back in - but not at the same level as before. Some didn't go back into farming at all, so it had a big impact around here.

"From a livestock market point of view, there's a lot less livestock about. We've diversified by doing household furniture sales and poultry.

"Markets up and down the country were forced to close, so we're grateful that we managed to keep going. But it isn't like it was in the good old days."

"Our cattle were perfectly healthy. The government was wrong in law in killing animals unless there was proof of foot-and-mouth. We escaped because of publicity surrounding Phoenix, the calf that crawled out from underneath dead cows. After that Tony Blair relented and let the stock survive if they were healthy more than 10 days after potential infection.

"The fault at the time was because people had not read the Duke of Northumberland's report into the 1967 outbreak, which said not to import from countries that have foot-and-mouth, but, if you have to, have a vaccination policy. They didn't do either."