OPINION: My Sussex cattle are paying the price of TB
Try as I might, I can’t seem to give up the cattle farming game.
Even though I live in an area where bTB is endemic to both cattle and badgers I’ve always liked to have beef cows on my farm. On my scrub-infested downland, sheep all too easily get caught up among the brambles, and on my water meadows they all too easily drown.
And so it was that last May I decided to nearly double the size of my suckler cow herd from its current 32 cows by buying in another 19. Not just any old 19 extra cows, you understand, but some beautiful pedigree organic Sussex cows with calves at foot – and a price tag to match.
I’d not had any bTB reactors for several years, so I was careful to purchase these new additions from a bTB-free area (the farm that the cows came from sits in a parish that has not had a bTB reactor for decades).
“At what point does one throw in the cattle farming towel?”
As my recent annual test loomed, I obviously had more cattle to test and therefore, on simple probability, a greater chance of a bTB reactor. But I comforted myself with the thought that the likes of the Soil Association maintain that organic livestock stand a better chance of fighting off diseases like bTB by developing a degree of natural resistance.
The bTB test of my organic Sussex cows was an unambiguous disaster: five full blown “reactors” and five “inconclusives”.
The reactors were quickly dispatched to a slaughterhouse where their bTB lesions were discovered to be so severe that AHVLA immediately wanted to remove all of the inconclusives from my farm as well because they were now categorized as “dangerous contacts”. So it was that with my new pedigree Sussex cows barely on my farm six months their numbers were more than halved.
I tried to draw comfort that “there is always someone worse off than yourself” from the lorry driver contracted to collect my cows, who told me that his next job was to collect 100 bTB-infected cows from a single dairy farm in Oxfordshire. But how is one really supposed to stay positive after such a setback? At what point does one throw in the cattle farming towel?
Since buying the Sussex cows and a bull last spring, I had enjoyed the summer planning what names I would give our first crop of pedigree heifer calves. I’d even imagined showing our cattle and fantasized about a partial dispersal sale, where other breed enthusiasts would bid thousands of guineas for some of my best stock. With the bulk of those calves now incinerated before they even made it beyond their mothers’ wombs, my plans for a valuable pedigree organic herd of Sussex cattle are now similarly up in flames.
The surviving cattle now have to run the gauntlet of a 60-day rolling testing regime until we have a clear test. I’ve inevitably been asking the question “why” such a heavy breakdown to bTB among these recent pedigree organic arrivals? My contact at AHVLA tells me that it’s not unusual for cattle brought in from areas of the country free of bTB to break down heavily to the disease once they are imported into a bTB endemic area. The theory goes that they are naïve to the challenge of the disease, so they are more easily infected.
I’ve farmed in a bTB endemic area for 30 years and I thought I knew most of what there was to know about bTB. It turns out, however, that I too was naïve to at least one aspect of this devastating disease – and it’s now my beautiful Sussex cows who are paying the price.
Stephen Carr farms an 800 hectare sheep, arable and beef farm on the South Downs near Eastbourne in partnership with his wife Fizz. Part of the farm is converted to organic status and subject to a High Level Stewardship Agreement.
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