A personal view

FARMERS CAN BE DEFT HYPOCRITES

Mike Kettlewell is in a family partnership which encompasses 400 acres of arable land, South Devon cattle and stewardship in the Cotswolds. He is a member of the North East Cotswold Farm Cluster.

Scanning the BBC news online recently, I was horrified by a report of a farm explosion and fire on a Texas dairy farm. The accompanying photograph revealed a flat, treeless plain with a dense black column of smoke rising high above a cluster of farm buildings into the cloudless sky.

Apparently some 18,000 cattle died in the inferno. One critically injured human was rescued and flown to hospital, but there was no such luck for the cows. Just imagine the fear, panic and pain suffered by these trapped animals. The cause was thought to be an accumulation of methane, ignited by overheating machinery.

The BBC report added information from the American Animal Welfare Institute that 6.5 milllion farm animals had died in barn fires in the past decade. Mostly chickens, but still, 7,300 were cattle. There was no public enquiry for such events.

Before we claim that this could never happen here, we must consider and accept the pressures to industrialise animal husbandry in the name of economic efficiency, alongside our own poor personnel safety record.

Thankfully, most applications to build mega dairies have been turned down because of objections from urban neighbours – one of the many difficulties, or perhaps benefits, of farming on a small, densely populated island.

Yet we rail against regulations aimed at improving animal care or the state of the environment. Perversely we are quick to criticise lapses of such regulation. Governments, for fear of losing power, are loath to risk raising sufficient taxes to fund better regulation, and industries, including ours, certainly won’t willingly countenance funding their own. We can be deft hypocrites!

This Texan dairy farm calamity would have had little local public impact, being so far from human habitation. Nonetheless such industrial exploitation of sentient animals with no means of escape is, I believe, ethically unacceptable, and the suffering extreme. Such huge numbers of cattle in a closed, poorly regulated, automated system producing mind-blowing quantities of slurry and methane has to be an obvious and unacceptable risk to animals. We must be on our guard.

In our own back yard we have had less dramatic scandals like some Welsh poultry farmers carelessly polluting the river Wye and, very recently, in a ‘dark urban back street’ an as yet unnamed meat processor fraudulently mixing cheap and rotting imported beef with British beef, then labelling it all British. The alarming thing about this latter incident is that so many large, well-known, retailers and manufacturers were buying this fraudulent stuff because their supply chain surveillance was so hopelessly inadequate.

I would therefore argue, forcefully, that we farmers, along with most other businesses and banks, need efficient and effective regulation that covers ethics, human and animal welfare, honesty and environmental damage, inter alia. No nit picking and box ticking.

This is a legitimate cost upon all of us, both customer and business. Our pressing need for regulation and legal enhancement stems from the length and opacity of our current food chain and economic power in so few hands. Those that can’t stand such regulation can always twiddle their thumbs on some benighted beach or, I’m sure, would be welcomed in a cold kleptocratic eastern oligarchy! The rest of us can do without anarchy.

As a corollary, I would also argue there is a strong social case for localising much more of our food production, shortening supply lines, cutting the carbon costs and reducing polluting packaging. There would be considerable environmental and economic gains from reducing food miles. It would also increase local employment, while connecting more people to their food sources and community.