Was livestock farming always this complicated?

An abundance of farming magazines and periodicals turn up in the post – all of the free variety. Some never make it out of their shiny plastic envelope; however, some are read avidly. We also get a weekly one, but we pay for that.

I sometimes wonder why we pay for it. Is it a habit or are we afraid if we don’t buy it we will miss something? This latter criterion is quite important. For example, farming conversations in the pub are quite competitive and you don’t want to be the one who doesn’t know something. If something happens that you don’t know about, others will return to it endlessly throughout the evening to help you catch up.

In the past month or so, in the magazines I have read, articles were published about downer cows, calf pneumonia, acorn poisoning and Johne’s disease. I have been warned about the dangers of internal parasites, fluke and worms, and something called cerebrocortical necrosis, which I had not heard of before. I have heard of trace element deficiency, subclinical mastitis and lameness, infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, and bovine viral diarrhoea.

The list of potential hazards to the health of farm animals is seemingly endless. It is a wonder to me any farm animals are left, let alone farmers.

First farming experiences

Was livestock farming always this complicated? I don’t think it was. I have been trying to cast my mind back to my first farming experiences. My father wasn’t a farmer, but I left school and went to work on a farm. Most importantly, from my perspective, I was to “live in” on the farm. This is as close to “living the dream” as I have got. The fact my bedroom was built at the end of a granary, which I shared with a lot of rats, was not a problem – I thought that was what farmers did.

I can only remember four diseases that impacted on my consciousness. Two of them I had to search for online because I had not heard of them for years. Firstly, there was wooden tongue. Whatever happened to wooden tongue? We used to get it several times a year. The affected cow would stand, working its tongue back and forth, obviously in discomfort, and its saliva would froth up and fill the manger in the cowshed. I cannot remember how we used to treat it.

Secondly, was red water. The symptoms are fairly obvious. Google tells me it is carried by ticks, but I can’t remember anyone telling me that. Perhaps it wasn’t real red water. Perhaps it was something else and they just called it red water.

Two other problems occurred on that farm that we used to lose cows to, and they are both present today, which is regrettable and, in some ways, appalling. First was Johne’s disease. I can still remember the first case I saw. It was in a first calf heifer and I can vividly recall her deterioration, her rapid loss of condition, and I saw a wildness to her eye that seemed to infer she knew she was going to die.

One thing I will never forget was the pool of foul-smelling faeces that accumulated behind her in the dung channel, which ran the length of the cowshed (skippon) behind the cows. It always seemed to have bubbles in it and had to be “spooned” into the wheelbarrow with a shovel.

I don’t know how you would quantify a Johne’s comparison between then and now, but I suspect the Johne’s status of the national herd is now worse. If it is worse it would be a staggering statistic. It would prove, as an industry, we are not quite as clever as we thought, and we need reminding of that.

We used to lose 2 or 3 cows a year (out of about 35) with terrible infections to their hocks, which had become damaged while lying on concrete all night in the winter when tied by the neck in cowsheds. You would assume this problem would disappear just as quickly as cowsheds disappeared and cows moved to loose housing and cubicles.

But it didn’t, did it? Why? Because farmers moved cows from a concrete stall in a cowshed to a concrete cubicle. By concreting the cubicle it replicated exactly the problem for the cow and her hocks, which she experienced in the cowshed. Don’t just take my word for it, look in any dairy farming magazine at the adverts for expensive mattresses to lay on top of the concrete, which are designed to make the bed more comfortable and attractive to the cow. This is not the complete answer because the cow’s udder is plonked on to the mattress, and if the mattress becomes porous it will be contaminated with leaked milk and the brown stuff, then, bingo, mastitis follows.

We have never concreted a cubicle bed; we started with earth beds and moved on to taking soil out and replacing it with deep sand. We rent a cubicle shed for dry cows that has concrete beds, but we stack big bales of straw on the head rail, the cows browse away at the straw, and what they don’t eat ends up as a sort of carpet on top of the concrete about three inches deep. A lot of the straw ends up in the slurry, but we are able to cope with that. Straw has never been so expensive as it is now, but it is still very cheap compared to the suffering of animals with damaged hocks.

TB disgrace

One other disease was present in my youth, which I have deliberately left until last – TB in cattle. At the time it was in full retreat. Unfortunately, this is not the case today, which, 60 years later, is a disgrace.

I have two clear memories of TB. On the outskirts of our village was a former stately home that had been converted to a TB hospital. On nice days we used to see groups of patients taking the air in the surrounding lanes. They were mostly people from the industrial valleys of south Wales. I assumed these were the “better ones”, on the road to recovery. If that was getting better, I wouldn’t want TB myself.

Two distinct markets for cattle existed at the time: those that had tested clear of TB attested cattle and those that had not. I well remember my boss coming back from Newport market one day and him saying he had just seen the highest yielding cow in Monmouthshire sold in the milking not attested section at the market. And who had bought her? A producer retailer from the south Wales valleys.

Here we are, 60 years later and TB is still a problem, and crazy, stupid things are still going on.