First organic foot-and-mouth suspect

2 March 2001



First organic foot-and-mouth suspect

By Donald MacPhail

GOVERNMENT vets are investigating the possibility that foot-and-mouth disease has spread to one of Britains flagship organic farms.

Officials were alerted after a five-week-old piglet went lame and died on Eastbrook Farm, in Bishopstone, near Swindon, Wiltshire.

The 1337-acre organic mixed farm is run by Helen Browning, owner of Eastbrook Farms Organic Meat and chairman of the Soil Association.

Restrictions are in place around the farm, which includes 300 dairy cows, 400 ewes and 160 breeding sows and their offspring.

If the disease is confirmed, it would be devastating for the organic sector, which has so far remained free from the disease.

As an organic unit, Eastbrook Farm buys livestock from other producers. It has no link with previous foot-and-mouth outbreaks traced to livestock markets.

Tim Finney, managing director of Eastbrook Farm Organic Pigs, said: “We have no contact with any farm nor any market which has the disease.”

However, the showpiece organic holding is an open farm which normally runs guided tours. This could have left it vulnerable to contamination from visitors.

Mr Finney said no other animals on the farm were showing suspicious symptoms and tests on 30 other pigs have proved negative.

Ms Browning took over the tenancy of Eastbrook Farm and started her company Eastbrook Farms Organic Meat in the late 1980s.

Eastbrook Farms Organic Meat now supplies organic meat to customers through a nationwide home delivery service and via supermarkets.

The Eastbrook Farms website says the company aims to provide livestock with as natural and long a life as possible within a commercial farming operation.

All livestock are reared outdoors, weather permitting, in small groups so as to maintain social structures, and moved regularly on to clean pastures.

It says high standards of animal husbandry keep disease to a minimum, allowing the animals immune system to develop naturally.

Homeopathy is often used with a high success rate, the company claims.

Organic pigmeat company Eastbrook Farm Organic Pigs is a joint venture with BQP/BQF – a division of Associated British Nutrition.

It handles 600 pigs a week from about 15 farms and until a fortnight ago had been involved with pigmeat exports to Europe.

The Ministry of Agriculture has so far investigated 242 possible cases of foot-and-mouth. Thirty-six cases were confirmed as at 1345hrs on Friday (2 March)