Farming future – deer, buffalo and bison?

These are testing times if you are a farmer. Most live a long-term sort of life – by its very nature, farming is long term and a farmer’s natural inclination is to make long-term plans for whatever the future may hold.

All that careful planning is thrown into chaos by Brexit. Farmers would like to plan for a future outside the European Economic Community, but that is impossible at the moment, simply because no one – and I emphasise no one – knows what form Brexit will take.

Therefore, farmers find themselves in a position where, for now, it is best not to make any plans, and this, in itself, requires a steady nerve.

Mixed messages

As if all this was not enough, we have the added complication of Michael Gove at the head of Defra. He is there just as long as it takes for him to be made Prime Minister.

He is a lot brighter than any predecessor I can think of, which is no way meant as an accolade, but he is putting his time at Defra to good use. He is using his position to make political points on a weekly basis. His door is open and he has a sympathetic ear for any group that seeks to lobby him. As a result, we get some dreadful mixed messages.

A few weeks ago, Mr Gove was advocating an arable system whereby you dispense with conventional ploughing and drill your next crop into the stubble of the previous one – this is called min till. Hot on the heels of min till comes the suggestion all animal waste slurry and solid manure should be ploughed in immediately to reduce ammonia emissions. We just have to hope not too many farmers have sold their ploughs and bought big drills with the money.

While these mixed messages abound, a shortage of common sense seems to exist. Mr Gove has appointed to his advisory board the sort of people who advocate the re-wilding of the UK – not just beavers and lynx, but wolves and wild cats – yet we hear very little about food production.

If it continues much longer, Mr Gove will sacrifice UK farming on the altar of his own ambition and ego.

As with everything else to do with Brexit, no timescale exists, but the biggest change will see the withdrawal of agricultural support. This will be popular with most people, but it will sow a fundamental change. Support at present goes towards land – it drives rents and land values. To put it into some sort of context, support payments are more than half of farming profit – no, you don’t need to have a lot of imagination to work out the implications.

I can’t think of a bigger change in the past – perhaps the closest would be the imposition of milk quotas in 1983. At the time, I kept 90 cows on 80 acres and produced 650,000 litres of milk. I was given a quota of 330,000 litres. I had one full-time employee who had worked for me at weekends when he was a schoolboy. I had to ask him to find something else – which he did, and we remain good friends.

As an industry, we didn’t handle milk quotas well – in fact, we panicked. Healthy, productive cows and heifers were slaughtered. There were stories of cows and heifers calving in pens in the cull cow section. I went to market one week and someone told me 1,000 cows were to be killed in Gloucester; I went on around the corner and someone else told me 1,500 cull cows were in Gloucester. Both figures were probably inaccurate, but the culling that went on was of that scale.

Here, we have made a fundamental change driven by the prospect of Brexit.

By the time you read this, we will be fully organic. It is my guess – and it was my guess two years ago (which it takes to convert) – if I am to continue to pay the sort of rents my landlords require on most of my land (which are short-term lets), I will need to attract just as much financial support as I can.

I suspect such support will be focused on sustainable farming that benefits the environment, but that is still a guess.

Nervous

Some farmers are more worried, and this is where it could affect vets. Most worried are sheep farmers. They are having a good year – which is a result of good demand from Europe and helped by a favourable exchange rate – but, in the future, lamb exports could be hit by a tariff; no one knows.

Evidence already exists that sheep farmers are looking elsewhere. Some are looking at deer farming – hardly a new concept. If it was me, I would be worried about the vast numbers of wild deer. As soon as venison becomes expensive, we are told thousands too many wild deer exist, just waiting to be culled. We see wild deer here most days, but 30 years ago it would be once a year.

As livestock farmers become more nervous about their future, their search for something different will gather pace. Not many years ago, a few buffalo herds were about, and more than a few buffalo stories. I’m sure, as with most farming stories, these were exaggerated, but the one I liked the best concerned a herd of milking buffalo. When the person who regularly milked them went on holiday they refused to give any milk – in fact, they laid down in the parlour. When he returned, they too returned to giving milk and the yields they had achieved before they “went on strike”. How that all worked is beyond me.

I saw a programme recently about farmers cutting down on sheep and introducing bison. The feature showed the bison being let out to grass. There was something of the firework about it: “Open the gate and stand well clear”. It was obvious bison have attitude – quite why anyone should feel the need to let such a dangerous animal out into their fields is beyond belief.

The implications for vets are endless. These animals will need treatment at some stage in their lives. They will want TB testing. When you’re packing the boot of your car, you will need a tranquilliser gun.