Editor’s View: Bluetongue is a fresh assault on national flock
Sheep with bluetongue © Jim Wileman The warning this week of a bluetongue-linked fertility crisis in rams is a timely reminder that the cascading effects of this disease are still rippling through the sheep and cattle sectors.
Half of the rams tested in the past three weeks by a Devon veterinary practice have been found to be infertile, compared to 20% in an ordinary year, with farmers being advised to get tests done even if no clinical signs of the disease have been observed.
With more rams being released to ewes daily at this time of year, time is clearly of the essence to get checks done or risk finding some very unpleasant results at scanning time.
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But imagine for a moment a sheep disease that had wiped out more than 200,000 breeding ewes each year for the past four years in England alone.
There would be uproar, lobbying, campaigns, investigations by the Efra committee and many calls for action.
Well, a decline on that scale has taken place, but because it has arisen for a multitude of reasons rather than one catastrophic event, there have been very few remarks made.
In 2022, England had a female breeding flock of almost 7.1m. Just four years later it stands below 6.2m head.
In the year to June 2026 alone there was a decline of more than 240,000 head.
We don’t have the 2026 figures for the other nations of the UK yet, but while there was also a sharp drop in the ewe flock in Northern Ireland in the year to June 2025, there was cheeringly no decline in Wales or Scotland.
I hope when we get the combined figures for the whole of the UK later this autumn that we’ll learn that the other nations have again had a moderating influence.
We all know that our home-grown production must not get too far ahead of demand, and domestic lamb consumption is in long-term decline, but it feels like the shrinkage we are experiencing at the moment goes well beyond that.
In 2022, the UK subsidiary of the Chinese-owned company that exports a major chunk of New Zealand meat products to the UK, Silver Fern Farms (UK), had a turnover of £51.8m.
Fast-forward to its most recent set of accounts, for the year 2025, and that had grown to £115m of UK-traded revenue.
What is the lesson here? It is not that 7m ewes is necessarily the right figure, or 6m is the wrong one if we now have a greater proportion of healthier flocks and viable businesses than we did four years ago.
And that feels likely, given the significantly improved market prices enjoyed by those that have stuck to the job, even if input inflation will have eaten away at a lot of that.
But there is still something rotten in the state of England that needs rooting out if we are to arrest the current rate of decline.
It is 10 years this week since I finished working for my parents on a sheep and beef farm and joined Farmers Weekly.
It would give me immense pleasure if, over the next decade, sheep farmers across the country could prove that I made an economically terrible decision.