We are urgently developing research requirements with other European laboratories to make sure we understand and the disease (Schmallenberg) better.It's hard to be optimistic about food security
Find out what’s been happening on-farm in Cumbria with this week’s farmer-writers.
The new year has begun on a very wintry note with quite a lot of snow and there is no sign of any warmer weather on the way.
The sheep have difficulty in finding any grass beneath the snow, so we are having to feed them all with silage and a little hay - something I was hoping we would not have to do for a week or two yet.
As our farm road is about three-quarters of a mile long and is very icy and rough with the packed snow, our only means of transport is the Land Rover, which is continuously ferrying people down to our car in the village and bringing others back up who are booked into the camping barn – most of them find it quite an exciting experience.
So much for global warming.
Work is kept to a minimum over the festive period but snow and ice do cause all sorts of problems. We seem to be using a lot of straw both in the feeder wagon and for bedding, most of our cows are in cubicles and I like to keep cattle clean.
Buying-in straw is one of our larger costs on the farm.
Reducing calving period
Before Christmas, we synchronised a batch of pedigree heifers to try and make calving easier and reduce the calving period. We did a similar thing last year which proved fairly successful but rather costly.
Andrew and I went down to the Limousin sale at Carlisle where heifers and weaned calves had an excellent trade. For a number of years we have had a sale of young bulls, so we hope trade keeps up.
I don’t know if Limousins have made us a lot of money but the involvement has made us a lot of good friends - people we would otherwise not have met.
I think 2009 has proved to be quite a reasonable year for farms like ours, most of it due to the weak pound, but what can we expect of the next decade?
We foresee demand for food increasing at an alarming rate.
The political parties have been making the right noises about food security but I find it hard to be optimistic.
Whichever party is in power after the general election, it will not want food prices to rise and the supermarkets will see to that. We are going to see a reduction in Government spending due to the state of the economy and we must all share the medicine.
Sadly, farmers are price-takers not price-makers. So in this coming year, we will try to produce as many lambs and calves as possible, try to breed them as well as we can, and try to rear them economically.
CUMBRIA
- Father and son, William and Andrew Cowx, farm at Hudscales, Hesketh Newmarket, near Wigton in Cumbria. The hill farm, at the north of the Lake District National Park, runs to 140ha (350 acres) with extensive fell rights. The family runs 100 sucklers, including 70 pedigree Limousins, and a flock of ewes.