Tag: livestock

Badly Behaved Dogs

For millennia we have been domesticating wild animals, some directly for food, others to perform numerous tasks to help with our daily life.  Cattle, sheep, pigs and goats give us milk and meat whilst horses provide motive power and transport.  From the days when man was a hunter/gatherer, dogs have aided in the hunt and still do today.  There are breeds of hounds to find and chase deer, hares, foxes and mink, now used primarily to follow a trail since the Hunting Act 2004, although it is still legal to use them to flush foxes to guns.

There are numerous breeds used for shooting but the two most popular are Labradors and spaniels.  Before the huge expansion of driven shooting, pointers were widely used for walked up or rough shooting.  Walking through the cover, the dog identifies the quarry, perhaps grouse in heather, and stands stock still, one front paw raised to alert the guns.  This was important in the days of muzzle loaders as it took time to prepare to take a shot.  When the guns are ready, the dog is asked to flush the bird from the cover for the guns to shoot at.

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John Edgar

It is a story of success, of hard work and taking the opportunities that arise.  The Rees family moved to Stakes Farm, Upham, south east of Winchester in 1918.  When David Rees took over in 1963, the mixed farm was 169 acres but, over the years, the pig and poultry enterprises were expanded and five adjoining farms were purchased, taking the total to nearly 1,000 acres.  David’s son George joined the business in 1996, his sister four years later.  In 2006, they sold up at Upham and moved to the South Lynch Estate, 2,300 acres near Hursley to the south west of Winchester.

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Demands on land use

Well over two thirds of the land mass of England is farmland and yet there is increasing debate about the use to which it should be put.  For forty years during and after the Second World War there was no doubt, it was to provide food for the nation, but other demands seem to have gained greater priority today.

            In 2020, a former Chief Adviser to Defra, Sir Ian Boyd called for half of our farmland to be planted to trees and wildlife habitat in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the decline in biodiversity.  He claimed that 50% of farmland provides just 20% of our food and that could easily be replaced by vertical farming, production in a controlled environment.  That would mean that 90% of our cattle and sheep would disappear but it would all help the fight against climate change.  A 90% drop in cattle and sheep would result in a far greater reduction in red meat and dairy products but that would be fine if we all became vegan or at least vegetarian.

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Avian influenza

The country is in the grip of an epidemic caused by a virus that is bringing massive loss of life.  It is not Covid, although that is still with us, and the mortality is amongst birds not humans.  Avian influenza or bird ‘flu has become a serious threat.

            It is not supposed to be like this, at least it used not to be.  The spread of bird ‘flu was thought to be caused by migratory birds so the outbreaks occurred when birds come here for the winter and died away in summer.  But now it seems to have become endemic and is with us all the year perhaps because it has become established in seabirds.  Around the coast of the British Isles we have some of the most important colonies of seabirds in the world.  The Farne Islands off Northumberland, for example, are home to around 200,000 including Arctic terns, Atlantic puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes and razorbills. 

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Seismic Shifts

The world has changed dramatically over the past few years.  Only time will tell how far the tectonic plates have shifted and whether life will ever be the same again.  In the UK, the pressure has been felt particularly in the countryside and the food chain.

            The first seismic shock came in 2016 when we voted to leave the European Union, although the impact came later on our subsequent secession.  That meant that we left the Common Agricultural Policy and had to design a new farming and countryside policy from scratch.  This has been a very slow process and we still have few details other than that direct payments are being phased out and, instead, farmers will be paid public money for public goods.  This is the most fundamental shift in policy since the Second World War and will inevitably cause difficulties along the way.  Brexit brought major disruption to our trade with the EU, by far our largest trading partner.  Some of that disruption has been smoothed over but much of it remains.  Another impact of secession was the end of the free movement of labour, which caused huge shortages that persist today due to a totally misguided immigration policy.

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New Year

The turn of the farming year comes at Michaelmas in late September rather than now.  That is the time when harvest yields are reckoned, cropping plans for the coming year implemented.  Ewes are flushed to increase ovulation before the tups join them and winter housing is prepared for cattle.  And yet it is customary, as Big Ben rings in the new calendar year, to reflect on the twelve months gone and look forward to the seasons to come.

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Commons Land

Commons make up some of our most cherished landscapes in Britain, not least because there is open public access across them.  They date back hundreds of years and have their origins in mediaeval patterns of land use.

            The feudal system of farming was adopted in the Middle Ages.  Large estates were held for the king by nobles who were obliged to provide men to serve the crown in times of war or insurrection.  In turn, Lords of the Manor held smaller holdings on a similar basis.  Farming was carried out for the Lord of the Manor by villagers, most of whom also held commoners’ rights to enable them to farm on their own account.  Land around the village suitable for arable cropping was laid out in strips with each commoner entitled to cultivate a number of strips.  There were usually three fields; one for cereals, perhaps winter wheat, one for spring cropping, turnips or other restorative crops, and one for fallow to recover fertility.

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Threat to Livestock

There has been huge change to our lives over the past fifteen years, much of it unrecognised.  Of course, the more obvious has been caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but others are just as significant.

            Starting with politics, the old divisions of left and right have been conflated with the current Conservative Government spending more tax-payers’ money than many Labour administrations.  The Labour party once represented the working man with its heartland in the industrial areas of Wales, the Midlands and the North of England, whilst the Tories represented professional classes in the South, the rural areas of the shire counties.  That was turned on its head at the last Election when the red wall turned blue and the Conservatives now woo votes in the post-industrial heartland once staunchly Labour.  Labour now appeals to middle class intellectuals in Notting Hill and Islington.   This raises the question of who stands for rural areas, the country folk that make up more than a quarter of the population?  Perhaps the Liberal Democrats after the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

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