Archive Article: 2001/03/09
Dennis Bridgeford
Dennis Bridgeford farms
50ha (125 acres) at Petley
Farm in Easter Ross, north
of Inverness. The farm
comprises a 480-sow
indoor unit producing 95kg
pigs for one outlet and 85kg
pigs for a local abattoir. A
further 320 sows are run
outdoors. Land not used for
pigs grows spring barley
AS an industry we seem to go from one crisis to the next. But the latest problem to hit not only the pig industry, but livestock farming in general is the worst possible scenario.
My thoughts recently have concerned how to prevent pig wasting syndrome arriving on the unit. Then out of the blue we have a foot-and-mouth outbreak.
I think I will remember the phone call for years to come, when the man from the Ministry called to say that because we had delivered cull sows to the plant where foot-and-mouth was first confirmed, we would require a herd inspection from a MAFF vet.
This automatically triggers a 21-day standstill on all stock movements. Your heart jumps into your mouth with terrible thoughts. Our link with the plant was distant. The sows had been delivered to a collecting centre 10 days prior to the outbreak and with the lorry never leaving the area I was as confident as you can be on these occasions.
After a very thorough inspection, we were thankfully given a clean bill of health. The only problem – in common with most other pig farms – is to organise accommodation within the unit to hold extra pigs for the shut down period.
If you could call it luck, the two weeks prior to the foot-and-mouth outbreak had been particularly good weeks of sales off the unit with an unusually quiet period of farrowing.
But over-stocking will be a problem if controls remain for any length of time. Let us hope the virus can be brought under control quickly.
I was getting quite a bit of stick regarding last months comments when I suggested we should re-build Hadrians Wall. The only change I would make is to build it higher. I am not trying to be detrimental to our neighbours, but with lifting of border controls with the Continent we seem to be getting an upsurge in disease problems.
As if all this wasnt enough the weather has been terrible with snow like we havent seen for years. *
Dennis Bridgeford breathed a sigh of relief when his unit, which had supplied sows to Cheale Meats, where foot-and-mouth was first identified, was given the all-clear.