Anthony Gibson: 'It is the most
natural and sustainable method of recycling'
Death is a sad but
inescapable fact of farming life. Sheep especially have a quite remarkable
propensity for dropping dead at a moment's notice, but any farming
operation involving livestock, no matter how well ordered, will have its
share of casualties.
And if you put all of the casualties, on all
of our thousands of livestock farms together, it adds up to a lot of dead
flesh. Some fairly rough and ready calculations, based on research work
carried out elsewhere in the UK, suggest an annual South West casualty
list of 100,000 cattle, 107,000 sheep, 129,000 lambs and 30,000 pigs. I
make that around 20,000 tonnes. Up until now, the task of disposal has
been shared between the knackers and the hunt kennels, with all the rest
(barring what the foxes, badgers and crows take) buried on
farm.
There is nothing whatever wrong with that, of course, or not
at least from an environmental perspective. Burial is the most natural and
sustainable method of recycling organic material; using the remains of one
generation to enhance fertility for the next. The two main alternatives,
incineration and rendering, are both hugely demanding in terms of energy
consumed, greenhouse gases produced and landfill space required. So why on
earth should it be that the EU is insisting that the burial of casualty
stock should be banned as from May 1, to be replaced by an alternative
which, whatever its final shape, can only be more expensive, more risky to
human and animal health and infinitely less environmentally-friendly than
the system it replaces? Leaving aside the admittedly tempting explanation
that everything done in the name of Brussels must inevitably be mad, bad
and anti-British, my conclusion is that the answer is actually nothing to
do with any pollution risk, and everything to do with the great god
traceability.
Under current legislation, farmers are required
either to keep a record of casualties with sheep, or to report them to the
British Cattle Movement Service if they are cattle. But that leaves the
authorities without any independent proof of an animal's fate. They have
to take the farmer's word for it that a casualty has been buried, and that
it has not, as they must presumably suspect, been sold on the black
market. But for better or for worse, on-farm burial is to be banned from
May.
A further stay of execution is just possible, but as the UK is
now the only EU member state which still permits the routine burial of
farm animals, our negotiating position is not strong. So, assuming that we
have to accept the inevitability of a burial ban, how are farmers to
dispose of all of those hundreds of thousands of carcasses? There appear
to be two options. The first would be to leave the market to sort it all
out. Running a knacker's yard may not be everyone's preferred career
choice, but I have no doubt that, in time, the laws of supply and demand
would ensure that outlets were available for all but the most remote
farmers, who would presumably have to give up keeping livestock. That
being rather too drastic and messy a solution for even our present bunch
of regulators to contemplate, we are left with the alternative, which is a
government-backed, nationally-organised fallen stock collection
service.
This would presumably involve setting up a network of
licensed knackers and hunts and giving each the responsibility of
collecting fallen stock from all of the farms within its allocated
territory. The knackers and hunts would then deliver to designated
rendering plants. Much the same sort of thing happens across much of the
Continent. Indeed, in Brittany, farmers leave their dead stock in large
wheelie-bins at the side of the road, for collection by the flesh man.
This does not make a pretty sight, as I know from the gruesome photographs
sent me by a concerned reader, and the implications for animal disease
appear quite horrendous. But the alternative, of knackers' vehicles
travelling from farmyard to farmyard to collect animals which may very
well have been diseased, is almost equally alarming.
This, from a
Government which is forever lecturing farmers on the subject of
biosecurity. Anyway, such a collection service would not come cheap. My
educated guess at the cost in the South West would be around £9 million a
year. Of that, the Government would fund around £4 million, that being the
cost of collecting and testing for BSE over 24-month-old cattle casualties
from farms, which it is already covering and which it has said it will
continue.
In terms of net cost to the farmer per carcass, I would
be surprised if we are looking at much less than £80 for adult cattle, £50
for growing cattle, £15 for calves, £17 for ewes and £27 for sows. In many
cases that will be more than the profit which the farmer would have earned
had the animal lived. We will be arguing strongly for a more generous
Government contribution. In several EU member states the authorities pick
up 100 per cent of the bills.
Anthony Gibson is South West regional
director of the
NFU
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