A chance to speculate on the months to come

Jinsy and David Robinson are organic dairy farmers from Penyrallt Farm in the Teifi Valley. It is a traditional, mixed, family farm, run by the Robinson family since 1960 and together they strive to farm in a way which has as little impact as possible on the nature around them

AT the start of a new year it is a chance to speculate on the possibilities of the months to come.

Foremost we would hope for a good summer giving the chance to make good fodder and to enjoy the beauties of living and working in the countryside, such as picnics in the fields and long warm evenings with the swallows dipping and diving around the tractors and mowers.

We have now been clear of bTB for two years, but every test brings anxiety and forces one to make choices that are not necessarily the best ones.

This was the situation we were in last month when we had to sell calves sooner than we would have liked.

They would have benefited from being kept another week, but the risk of failing the bTB test and then not being able to sell was the deciding factor, one had to take into consideration the pressure of added costs of shed space and feed etc. However we were clear thank goodness, and so we wait for the next time.

It is with the bTB issue in mind that I find Christianne Glossop’s (chief veterinary officer for Wales) recent comments as voiced at the recent NFU conference very cynical.

She advocated a military style approach to bTB eradication, ‘find, fix and destroy’. How many more years must this ‘war’ continue especially as Dr Glossop was unable to give an answer to the question of controlling bTB in the wildlife population.

The other aspect to this whole debacle is the emotional cost to farmers who walk a tightrope of uncertainty; the military analogy would be friendly fire!

Mind you, if Dr Glossop did succeed in fixing and destroying bTB what a blow to the coffers of the veterinary profession it would be.

Last summer we played host, along with several other farms in Wales, over a period of months to a television film crew who were working on a programme entitled The Secret Life of Farm Animals which was broadcast during the first three weeks of December on BBC4.

One is often slightly apprehensive as to how such programmes will come across and after watching the series we did wish that a little more farmer involvement in the writing of the script had been encouraged.

Consider the 11-day-old calf not yet ear-tagged, the pet pigs being taken for walks in Chelsea – did they have a pig walking licence (yes, there is such a thing) and how does walking pet pigs fit in with the pig movement regulations and the mis-identifying of house-martins for swallows.

The devil is in the detail, but, that said, the programmes were visually attractive and had some interesting moments.