Grazing land owners to have a Herd Register

The section that caused me real problems reads: ‘Landowners should note that where they provide land for grazing but they are not required to become the registered keepers of the animals on Cattle Tracing System (due to a valid CTS link being in place) they will be liable for on-farm animal records (Herd Register) as well as other cross compliance standards on their holding, including the land being grazed’.

Suddenly, and for the first time, Defra and the RPA have imposed a new requirement on people that has never previously existed. Some claim that the original EU legislation imposes this duty on landowners.

So here we head back to Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000 of the European Parliament and of the Council of July 17, 2000.

Here in Article 3 it states:

‘The system for the identification and registration of bovine animals shall comprise the following elements:

(a) Ear tags to identify animals individually.

(b) Computerised databases.

(c) Animal passports.

(d) Individual registers kept on each holding.’

At first inspection, this might be taken to support the stance adopted by the 2006 cross compliance supplement. But if you actually read the rest of the Regulation, you will discover that there is a lot of good stuff in there.

Article 4 covers ear tags in further detail.

Article 5 covers Computerised Databases in further detail.

Article 6 covers animal passports in further detail and has plenty to get your teeth into.

It starts with the immortal words: ‘As from 1 January 1998, the competent authority shall, for each animal which has to be identified in accordance with Article 4, issue a passport within 14 days of the notification of its birth’.

No ‘ifs’, no ‘buts’, no quibbles about late application, it states, in comparatively simple English, that the competent authority will issue a passport within 14 days of the notification of the animal’s birth. As a Notification of Registration is not a passport, then the UK Government has been failing to meet its responsibilities under this regulation.

But after that intriguing diversion, we come to Article 7, which covers individual herd registers. Article 7 reads: ‘1. With the exception of transporters, each keeper of animals shall: keep an up-to-date register’.

No petty quibbles here. The keeper is responsible for keeping a herd register. Not the landowner – landowners aren’t mentioned.

Some people may worry that there are animal health and traceability implications of the landowner not keeping a herd register, but personally I have trouble seeing any.

If the SVS is checking centrally to see whether there are any cattle within a certain area, then they will merely have BCMS print out the details, tied in with all these digitised maps we have had to provide the information for. BCMS will tell them who the keepers are and the SVS can contact the keepers.

It is possible that if a member of the SVS just chances to be driving round and spots some cattle in a field and wants to check them, then he could just go to the landowner and get the details.

But actually, fields don’t normally carry the landowner’s name and phone number on the gate, so the vet would still have to contact the database to find out who was the landowner.

The same database would give him the keeper of the animals in that field in any case.

Obviously, the vet could stand by the gate flagging down passers-by to ask them if they knew who owned the field, but surely the RPA database hasn’t collapsed so utterly that they are reduced to that.

So having discovered that the RPA has gold-plated regulations to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, what would be the down sides?

Well, I know a lady who has a small paddock and a couple of horses.

At certain times of year she will ask a neighbour for her grass to be eaten down and he will walk a batch of store bullocks along the road to the field, they will be there perhaps a month, and then walk home again.

The field is linked to his holding with BCMS while the bullocks are there so it is all above board.

So let us look at the lady in question. She has no handling facilities, no crush, no race, no nothing.

As a gentleman I couldn’t discuss her age, but I feel no shame in revealing that she is probably too old to run hairy-eared black bullocks down on foot before wrestling them to the ground and reading their ear tag.

I have pointed out that if her horse was any use, she could ride alongside them and launch herself from the horse onto the bullock and wrestle it down from above, but I feel that her icy silence at this point was indicative of a general lack of approval of my suggestion.

One consolation is that, because the RPA claim this obligation on landowners is statutory, landowners will have to fulfil them, even if they aren’t caught by the cross compliance system.

So I await with interest the howl that goes up when a lot of environmental charities and even the Ministry of Defence (there is no Crown Immunity under this regulation) discover they have just had the duty of keeping lists of cattle imposed on them.

Jim Webster farms beef and sheep on 150 acres at Barrow-in-Furness and is president of Cumbria CLA.

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Jim Webster