FOOT & MOUTH, 20 YEARS ON – SPECIAL REPORT
A plea for farmers to ‘get bigger, get different or get out’ in the wake of the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak marked a watershed moment for Wayne Copp and the farming career that was to follow. Athwenna Irons meets him to find out more
CONSERVATION grazing is the name of the game for North Devon livestock farmer, Wayne Copp.
High above the three-mile expanse of Woolacombe’s glorious sandy beach, his 100-strong herd of pedigree Red Ruby Devon cattle and handful of Hebridean sheep have an important job to do in managing and maintaining a range of diverse habitats, including sand dunes, coastal heathland, cliffs and salt marsh.
With a cold and fierce wind blowing in straight off the Atlantic, the small group of heifers stood before us are as tough as nails, not turning an auburn hair as they pick their way through the vegetation.
It’s fair to say that this is low-input, sustainable agriculture on the edge. Wild and unforgiving, but rich in environmental and visual reward as snipes and skylarks dart to and fro.
However, this wasn’t the plan over two decades ago, when Wayne continued the family tradition by taking on Twitchen Farm, located a stone’s throw from Woolacombe’s usually bustling resort. In his early thirties at the time and starting a family with his late wife Caroline, who tragically passed away with cancer in August last year, leaving behind four daughters, this Ilfracombe-born farmers’ son was “really going for it”.
He reflects: “I’d stuck my neck out and borrowed a lot of money. I had bought a lot of land and a lot of livestock, with over 1,000 North Country Mules.” But the foot and mouth outbreak in February 2001 was to change all of that, putting Wayne on a completely different path towards sustainable farming and, ultimately, where he stands today as executive director of A Greener World (AGW) UK and Europe, part of a network of certifiers under the A Greener World Global umbrella. Established in 2014, A Greener World identifies, audits, certifies and promotes practical, sustainable farming systems by supporting farmers and informing consumers. AGW’s growing family of trusted certifications includes Certified Animal Welfare Approved by AGW, Certified Grassfed by AGW, Certified Regenerative by AGW, and Certified Non-GMO by AGW.
Certifying a fast-growing number of farms in the South West, each programme is designed to have positive and measurable impacts on the environment, society and animals, and to encourage truly sustainable farming practices, with its standards and procedures described as “robust, transparent and achievable”.
Today Wayne, 55, is under no illusion that foot and mouth marked his farming life forever. “In some ways it takes me right back, but in others it feels like yesterday,” he says. “I remember that morning on February 19, 2001, hearing the announcement while listening to the BBC’s Farming Today programme and thinking ‘foot and mouth – what does it mean?’
“Within a very short space of time, everything was closed off and overnight my stock was worthless. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Within a very short time, everything was closed – and overnight my stock was worthless WAYNE COPP
Suddenly my business model, which was ‘numbers, numbers, numbers’, didn’t make sense anymore. I couldn’t sell anything.”
Whilst Wayne managed to evade foot and mouth on his farm, he says the impact of the outbreak still left deep financial scars. “There was quite a generous compensation for stock that were culled. Those farmers that lost big numbers went out with some fairly significant capital sums. Ironically, those that remained had livestock that were worth nothing. But you still had to feed it, you couldn’t just walk away.
“It was draconian. There were slaughterings, funeral pyres and all
the iconic images that everybody remembers today. There were whitesuited vets wandering around the countryside policing what was going on, as they should, and it did control the spread of the disease.”
He adds: “While I’m reluctant to draw parallels with the coronavirus pandemic, farmers almost had their own Covid moment amongst their community at that time. It was in plain sight, but not really empathised with people at large. It was viral and out of our control. It devastated livelihoods overnight.”
With the domestic sheep market over-supplied and no exports, Wayne had to look for another way if he was to keep on farming at Twitchen. And he found it in the form of the Government-appointed Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food in 2002, chaired by Sir Donald Curry.
Published in the wake of foot and mouth the year before, the report described the present set-up as “dysfunctional” and made a number of recommendations for change, including a reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), re-targeting of public funds towards environmental and rural development goals instead of sustaining production, and better co-operation between farmers to reduce inefficiencies and improve competitiveness.
Its key theme was to “reconnect our farming and food industry; reconnect farming with the market and the rest of the food chain; reconnect the food chain with the countryside; and to reconnect consumers with what they eat and how it is produced.”
But it was Sir Curry’s short, yet powerful seven-word mantra of ‘get bigger, get different, or get out’ that would prove most pivotal for Wayne, with this ideology still ringing true some 20 years later.
He explains: “I still think that’s a metric to run over your farm business at any time. By ‘different’ he meant get yourself a unique selling point, do something that people want to buy.
“At that time, organic seemed to be the natural step to take. It meant less inputs and better animal welfare. It was also a better life for you as a farmer, your stock and the environment. It was a win for everybody. The foot and mouth outbreak put me down the environment and sustainable farming route which I’ve been on ever since.
“Very shortly after taking that on, I’d scaled down the farm and was benefitting from an enhanced farmgate price. I’m trained as a project and programme manager so I was able to do that, combined with some off-farm organic consultancy and audit work for various UK farming bodies. I was still farming the same acres, but my output had a premium attached to it because of what it was. It just felt like the right way to go. Rather than pushing for the high volume and low margins model which is very risky, as I found out.”
Having been in the family for five generations, today’s Twitchen Farm is certified organic through Organic Farmers and Growers (OF&G) and, naturally, Certified Animal Welfare Approved (AWA), Certified Grassfed and Certified Non-GMO by A Greener World.
Becoming executive director of A Greener World UK & Europe in 2018, Wayne is now joined in the operation by a development director and a compliance director, with another five members of compliance staff that sit under them, representing a broad spectrum of agricultural knowledge.
Back on the home farm, Wayne prides himself on partnering closely with the National Trust and Natural England as owners of some of the rarest and most beautiful habitats on this stretch of coastline and in the North Devon Biosphere, with many considered Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
And although not the case currently, given the coronavirus pandemic and its travel restrictions, Twitchen is a popular destination for holidaymakers, boasting an on-site caravan club and caravan storage facilities.
So while many things may have changed for Wayne and how he chooses to farm, the memories of foot and mouth will forever be bittersweet.
He says: “As a wound, not only financially but socially and in terms of my motivation, it took a long time to heal. But it jolted me, woke me up.
“It did really kickstart organic as well. I remember feeling that it was almost a wake-up call for folks to maybe think about not pushing things quite so hard. Animals aren’t widgets in a wheelbarrow, they are living creatures and you can only push them so far before they break.”
Wayne concludes: “Foot and mouth was such a seminal moment for agriculture. But I think the legacy that it leaves behind is the movement protocols that we have within the industry today. Our cattle traceability, for example, is the best in the world, together with British agriculture as a whole. I’m fortunate to have been involved with farming systems all over the globe, thanks to A Greener World and there really is nothing else quite like it.”
Tomorrow: Eight pages of pictures that bring home the heartache and the hope of the foot and mouth crisis