A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  During that month we went out as little as possible. Confirmed cases of FMD on the banks of the Severn had brought the infection terrifyingly close. Worse, oozing truckloads of dead animals were being brought from infected farms further up the vale, and burned no more than three miles away as the crow flies. And the crows did fly – along with buzzards, seagulls, pigeons, and rooks – soaring along the rim of the Cotswold escarpment as they engaged in their usual spring business of building nests and scavenging for food, bringing who knew what traces of virus from the pyre to the rest of the valley?

  The same applied to all free-ranging wildlife. What was the use of keeping beef and dairy cattle under lock and key in a covered yard when a disease-carrying badger might be urinating in the silage-clamp, or a fox drinking from the water-trough? Farmers in the neighbourhood were in total lockdown, rapidly running out of winter forage for their yarded beasts. Small wonder that the price of big bales doubled by mid-April, when the animals were usually turned out to grass.

  As the months passed, the dilemma of what to do with beasts who, in the terms dictated by the BSE epidemic, had passed their Sell-By date, grew ever more acute. The Over Thirty Month (OTMS) rule stipulated that beef animals over that age were not allowed to enter the human food chain, since after this it was thought they might be old enough to develop bovine spongiform encephalopathy. It was a shamefully wasteful policy, which meant that slow-maturing breeds were effectively barred from the meat trade, (though eventually in 2005 the law was amended to allow cattle over 48 months to enter the food chain provided all tissue that might contain the BSE prion had been removed by the abattoir).

  Night after night, the TV news was dominated by reports of fresh outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, with grim pictures of panicking sheep being chased by white-clad slaughtermen, of enormous blazing pyres, or tear-streaked children whose family farm had been served with the dreaded D Notice as the prelude to exterminating the livestock there.

  Newspaper campaigns were launched to save particular animals, with varying success. Monks mounted a round-the-clock vigil to prevent the killing of a sacred bull belonging to a Hindu shrine, but eventually had to give in. By contrast, a pure-white Charolais calf named – inevitably – Phoenix, which was discovered alive several days after its mother and the rest of its kindred had been slaughtered, was reprieved by the Prime Minister after a public outcry – a triumph of sentimentality over logic.

  Since the virus thrives in cold, wet conditions, everyone prayed for a heatwave, but it was not until late June that there was a noticeable diminution of confirmed cases, and only at the end of September that the last report of infection allowed the country to believe the disease was finally under control.

  That was by no means the end of 2001’s tribulations, however. Hated and despised throughout the seven-month epidemic for its officious incompetence and inertia, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food had morphed into a new body to be known as DEFRA – the elaborately named Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs – but since this new department was composed of many of the same civil servants who had formerly run MAFF, and exhibited just the same devotion to forms in triplicate, incomprehensible jargon and buck-passing as its predecessor, disgruntled farmers who had to deal with DEFRA pointed out that the changed name had no more impact than when Windscale nuclear establishment became known as Sellafield.

  Cleaning and disinfecting affected premises was a long hard job which took months to complete. Wooden barn doors, feed troughs, and hayracks had to be ripped out and burnt, and hardcore removed from farmyards. Sales of power-hoses, disinfectants and pressure-washers soared as concrete barriers and plaster on walls up to the height of ten feet were scoured clean, but it was late in the year before FM7 forms denoting that all buildings, machinery and equipment were clean enough to satisfy DEFRA inspectors were issued to farms where livestock had been exterminated, and most farmers decided to leave any question of restocking until the following spring.

  It was a grim, gruelling, gruesome year for anyone connected with animals susceptible to foot-and-mouth disease. During those seven months of countryside lockdown, the epidemic was estimated to have cost the taxpayer £8 billion. Six and a half million animals had been killed, though the number of confirmed cases was no more than 2026, stark figures which have re-ignited the argument for vaccination rather than wholesale slaughter in any future outbreak of FMD.

  Even in the best of times, when there is no large-scale agricultural plague threatening livestock, I found it difficult to keep all the animals we had on the strength healthy all the time, and when the epidemic of 2001 was definitely over, we took the decision to reduce our headage to a more sensible level. Never again did I want to own more animals than we could feed or, if necessary, bring under cover without overcrowding.

  It was hardly surprising that having spent twelve years in our former home scrabbling around for grazing, with no more than a rented acre and a half of poor, sour grass at our disposal, the possession of five whole hectares of excellent pasture had gone to my head. Year on year I had steadily increased the number of animals our fields were required to support. I had added extra horses from time to time, a couple of donkeys here, and a trio of alpacas there. Every season I had retained a few extra homebred shearlings until the flock numbered nearly fifty each summer, but the FMD epidemic had been a wake-up call, demonstrating how vulnerable to disease this overstocking made us.

  During that long, cold, anxious spring I had lost several lambs through my reluctance to call out the vet from his premises so close to the nearest FMD outbreak. Who knew what invisible virus might be clinging to some part of his vehicle, no matter how thoroughly it was washed and disinfected?

  Then there were the run-of-the mill injuries and illnesses to consider. With such a mixed bag of livestock, there always seemed to be at least one four-footed dependent giving cause for concern. A persistently lame ram. A donkey with a nasty cough. A horse who reacted so badly to midge-bites that she rubbed her mane and tail raw between May and September. Chickens with scaly eruptions on their legs, alpacas who became mysteriously lethargic, lay down, and quietly died – the list was never-ending. Few warranted an expensive visit from the vet, but one could spend a fortune on over-the-counter powders and lotions that seldom did much good.

  Dealing with death is always distressing, but anyone who keeps animals has to get used to it. As with children, infections and injuries seem to come in waves, and since sheep are susceptible to an astonishing range of illnesses, not all of which can be cured by antibiotics, from time to time we would find ourselves in need of a way to dispose of large dead bodies.

  At lambing time, in particular, many things can go wrong. The most common vicious spiral involves the malpresentation of lambs in a multiple birth, which leaves the ewe too exhausted to feed her family, or the lambs themselves too weak to suckle. That means the ewe will probably have too much or too little milk, which in turn may lead to mastitis, which may or may not respond to antibiotics, but all too often results in sudden death.

  Quite apart from the difficulty of saving the orphan lambs, there is then an urgent need to dispose of the heavy, awkward, stiffening corpse. At seventy to ninety kilos, a full-grown Wiltshire Horn ewe is too big to bury or take to the local recycling plant, so when you have recovered from the shock of her death, the question is what to do with the carcase?

  In the easygoing past, most fallen stock would be accepted by the local hunt. A telephone call to the kennelman would be followed by the prompt arrival of the flesh-van. The dead animal would be winched into its cavernous depths, a modest donation made to the hunt, and off would go the carcase to be skinned, cut up, and added to the hounds’ diet.

  Then came a period when hunts phased out such collections, partly because of cost, partly because of the fear of some infection and, in any case, getting a taste for mutton is bad for the morals of a hound which has been so carefully trained to ignore sheep on the hoof. Th
e smallholder faced with a carcase to dispose of then had the option of burying on his own land – difficult without a mechanical digger – or persuading a larger farmer to allow it to disintegrate in his muck-heap, a course which put the owner of the dead sheep under a certain obligation and couldn’t be exploited too often.

  Presently even this option became impossible. Post BSE, post FMD, the rules governing the disposal of carcases became ever tighter. On-farm burial or burning was forbidden for fear of polluting water-courses, and the same went for allowing dead animals to rot in a muckheap.

  Smallholders like us found ourselves in an impossible position, with no above-board means of disposing of fallen stock. It took an unpleasant spate of fly-tipping, when bloated sheep carcases – whose ears had been cut off to make identification impossible – were dumped beside roads or in lay-bys, to spur the Government into recognising the problem. At last in 2005, a not-for-profit organisation called the National Fallen Stock Company (NFSCo) was set up, and its existence has considerably improved matters.

  Membership of the NFSCo gives access to a list of all the deadstock hauliers in the neighbourhood, and their collection rates for disposing of each category of animal. Instead of the unsatisfactory and guilt-inducing business of negotiating some hole-and-corner arrangement with a neighbour, a single telephone call will bring a clean lorry equipped with a winch and cheerful, competent collector to your farm within 48 hours. Although it doesn’t make the loss of an animal any less tragic, it certainly removes much of the stress from the aftermath.

  Smaller fatalities are all too common, and these have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. It is hardly worth summoning the fallen stock lorry for a stillborn lamb or suffocated piglet, still less for a chicken that succumbs to coccidiosis or old age. Here scavenging foxes, badgers, ravens and carrion crows still have a useful part to play. Once a creature is definitely dead I am not squeamish about disposing of it, but in common with most women I am bad on the in-between cases, and find it difficult to administer the coup de grace even when it is plainly the kindest thing to do. Using the right degree of force to break the neck of a diseased hen without pulling its head off, or to kill a moribund rabbit without getting covered with blood are practical skills necessary to every smallholder, and I am very fortunate that my husband has these at his fingertips.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Shepherding Year

  Although I have now been keeping sheep for quarter of a century, I still have much to learn about breeding, rearing, and finally selling them, for every year brings its own challenges, many of them relating that notorious imponderable against which every farmer complains unceasingly – the weather. Whatever it throws at us is always going to be wrong for someone. A dry cold winter with a warm wet spring produces a completely different set of problems from a mild winter with late frost and snow, but once the reproductive cycle is under way, the ewes will give birth whatever the weather conditions, whether there is enough grass to support them or not, and all the shepherd can do is hope for the best while providing for the worst.

  Midway between the shortest day and the Spring equinox, Candlemas Day – February 2nd – tends to catch me by surprise. By tradition, at that point in the winter a farmer should have used up no more than half his supply of forage, whereas by then I am usually down to my last few bales.

  The shepherding year begins, as the calendar year ought to, when summer gives way to autumn. Surveying our fields with their September glut of long, lush grass, I have to cast my mind back to those bleak days in 2001, when it seemed as if winter would never end, and every blade of green was nipped off level with the mud the moment it appeared, in order to counter the temptation to add just a few more sheep to my little flock.

  Enticing schedules for the big autumn sheep shows-and-sales up and down the country are best binned immediately, lest my resolve weakens – though in every third or fourth year, when we are in need of a new ram, I usually trawl through the Private Sales columns on the Wiltshire Horn Society website, to see what is on offer and compare prices and bloodlines. As with all minor breeds, the gene pool is relatively small, so it makes sense to breed from stock unrelated to our own for several generations.

  Meantime, the weather is changing, and with it the behaviour of the sheep. As the days shorten and the temperature drops, even the most stately ewes become skittish, engaging in sparring matches or rushing headlong from one end of the field to another for no apparent reason.

  At the same time our ram of the moment, who has been living in tranquil male segregation with his current buddy, an unflappable wether, ever since the previous December, begins to attack fence posts and beat up the trees in his paddock, battering his thick frontal bone against their trunks until the bark is scarred and his horns bloody at the base. Even a human can smell his rank, acrid scent from fifty yards away, and the ewes, with their more sophisticated nasal receptors, can pick it up across several fields. He is stating, without the smallest possibility of misunderstanding, that he would like to join his harem – right now – but my usual reaction is, Not so fast, my lad! For from my point of view, the date on which he goes in to the ewes must be carefully considered, since it will influence much of the coming year.

  The traditional rule-of-thumb timespan for ovine gestation is between Guy Fawkes Day and April Fools’ Day – November 5th to April lst. If you want early lambs for showing purposes, or to catch the Easter market, and are prepared to risk a late cold snap next spring, you might put the ram in earlier – say September; equally, if you plan a skiing holiday at Easter, you could delay the arrival of lambs by putting the ram in with his ewes in mid-November.

  Keeping him waiting, however, is fraught with anxiety because he is strong and single-minded. Once a fence-post snaps off under his onslaughts, he will be over the wire like a hurdler, and as soon as the ewes scent his proximity, they will crowd up to the nearest point of their own fence, egging on his advances.

  So my calculations have to be quickly made. In this sheltered valley, the spring grass usually starts growing in mid-March. If the ewes are served in mid-October, lambs can be expected from the end of the first week in March onward – that, at least, is the theory. In practice, this timetable can easily be thrown out by bad weather – late frosts and snow that hold back the grass – or by the ewes’ own metabolisms. If they are too fat or too thin at the time of tupping, they will not conceive on their first cycle, so you end up with lambs born over a period of weeks rather than days.

  This is tiresome, because the efficient management of sheep requires all medical treatment to be performed en bloc. Lambs have to be vaccinated against the most deadly clostridial diseases, as well as tagged and dosed for worms, and it is far easier to do them all at the same time. If there is a wide variation in age and weight it not only makes calculating dosage more tricky, but it is all too easy to omit one of these routine procedures because the lamb was out of sync with the rest of his generation, should have been dealt with separately, but wasn’t.

  Shepherds with large flocks use hormone-impregnated sponges to induce all their ewes to ovulate at the same time, and often back these up with a ‘teaser’ – a vasectomised ram – to get the ladies in the right frame of mind when the approved sire is introduced, but these sophisticated methods are not for a holding as small as ours, where Nature allied to a vigorous young ram can be relied on to do the business without recourse to veterinary science.

  Nor do we scan the pregnant ewes to discover how many lambs each is carrying. Again, this can save a large flockmaster a lot in feeding-costs, because by separating ewes expecting singles from those carrying twins or triplets, and feeding them proportionately less concentrates in the vital six weeks before lambing, the nutrition goes where it is needed most.

  So the date for tupping is decided upon, and the next important step is to pen the ram, trim his feet, inspect his teeth, and generally check him over. Though our experience with Agamemnon had taught us the folly of making
a pet of a ram, we discovered during the four-year reigns of each of his successors that a wild, scared ram is even more of a menace, and it is well worth spending some time taming and handling any promising candidate for stud duties while he is still young enough to control with relative ease.

  It is essential to be able to put on a halter or head-collar, for example, and teach him to stand quietly while tied to an upright. It is also worthwhile making sure that the post is a strong one. Weeks of works are cancelled out the moment he finds he can pull free from whatever is restraining him, or lift up the hurdles of his pen with a crafty twist of the horns, because once he knows it is possible, he will try to do it again. And again.

  The same applies to the ewes, and it is interesting to see the wide variety in their responses to being caught up and handled. They may all look alike, but temperamentally each has her own quirks and eccentricities. Some will let you pick up their front hoofs without demur, but kick furiously the moment you lift a hind leg. When this happens, the only hope is to take a good grip, pin her against the side of the pen with your knee, and hang on grimly while she rears up, lies down, and tries to batter your hand to a pulp. It helps to remember that she will eventually stop struggling, though sometimes it seems to take a very long time before she accepts the situation. By then, foot-shears, sponge, and antibiotic spray will have been sent flying, and you must retain your grip on the leg to be treated while cautiously retrieving them and getting to work on the overgrown horn.