Electronic tagging for sheep

I'm having an ill-informed panic. I have no idea yet what the consequences will be. I don't know how the farm will be affected. But all around me there are rumours and facts posing as rumours washing around regarding the need for sheep to be electronically tagged by the end of 2009. According to Europa, "Electronic identifiers cost around 1-2€ per animal, hand-held readers are available from around 200€ and static readers from around 1000€. Farmers and operators will be responsible for the costs of meeting the requirement to electronically identify every sheep and goat. However, these costs should be offset by better disease control measures resulting from more effective identification".
For me that's simply an unaffordable prospect with a flock of 25- 30 ewes. I'd hope that there can be some kind of co-operative sharing among small farmers, but that's not easy to sort, even when surrounding farmers are eager to support each other. This was brought home by the attempts at minimising the waste of necessary but expensive Bluetongue vaccine; the stuff has to be used within 8 hours, and if you didn't need a whole bottle, or needed one or two doses more than a bottle, a mad ring-round ensued, with the vets dispensing the stuff unable to help with this logistical nightmare.
I need to find out more and come back to this when I feel better informed. Meantime, I'm having a gloom moment about the future of small farmers.

Gralloching, lairage and more

Health warning - don't scroll down if you'd rather avoid seeing pictures taken in an abattoir.

I love a day when new words come pouring into my ear. Or when words I sort of think I kind of know, finally start to make sense.
Today was a day that I knew I would have to meet head on at some point. I've been trogging lambs and pigs to the abattoir for many years now, but I hadn't ever seen the process from start to finish. Thanks to the incredibly useful EBLEX who run short courses for meat producers on all sorts of areas crucial to the farmer, I finally saw the whole story.
It's key that your animals are slaughtered at the right time: when they are at the best rate of fat to lean. Too fat, and they have to be trimmed and you've spent weeks feeding your livestock unnecessarily, expensively and to the detriment of your meat. Too lean, and you'll have a flavourless, scrawny chop on your plate and dissatisfied customers. A lamb is covered in fleece, so you have to get (gentle) hands on to find out when each individual lamb is ripe and ready. There's a Europe wide classification system for lamb based on a combination of fatness and conformation used by every abattoir and every butcher and every supermarket and every wholesale and retail purchaser. Getting it right on a live animal is as much an art as a science. This is not something you absorb through rural osmosis, but something you have to be taught, and it has to be practised so you keep your hand in.
Today's course was held at a huge local abattoir, and run by two extremely knowledgeable, jolly and helpful experts. We looked at the charts, we had the pictures explained, and then we went to the lairage (nice new word number one) to grade ten pre-selected lambs.
I fondled a scrawny article, a fat beast and one that was fat but had unequal conformation, and then another seven lambs along the spine, loin, shoulder, tail and between the legs to arrive at an estimated grade for each. Then it was on with the white boilersuit, hairnet and hard hat, a disinfect of wellies and hands, and into the processing area.
The scale of the thing took my breath away: a continuous line of machinery, people and lambs, with everyone focussed on their task, executing it cleanly, swiftly, carefully and with the right tools for the job. We were asked if we wanted to see the slaughter, and no-one baulked. It was so calm, professional, simple, with the layout designed to cause nil stress to the animal or the slaughterer. I watched several animals being stunned and throats cut. I wanted to make sure I saw the reality of where my animals are headed, and I felt nothing other than reassurance and thanks that such an important role in the food chain was being so expertly undertaken.
We followed the line as skins were removed, guts discarded (for deer this process is called gralloching - second new word of the day) and offal inspected. We were shown examples of condemned livers - suffering from tapeworm or fluke and other parasites - and also arthritic joints that meant a leg or more might be spurned as unfit for human consumption. Every liver and heart is kept alongside its carcase; if there is something wrong with these organs, the meat might also be compromised, and it is thoroughly checked. I saw the results of injecting against Bluetongue in the wrong muscles (the neck is the recommended place), and that lambs were being sent both too thin and too fat to slaughter.
We watched the professional grader determine the score of each lamb, the automatic weighing, the tingling with electric current, which reduces the need for hanging by tenderising the meat (hmm...not sure about that one), and then headed for the chiller, where the ten lambs we'd attempted to score were now tagged with the official result.
Out of the seven I'd guessed, I only got one spot on, but the other six were only one grade out, so I was reassured that I can pretty much tell what I'm looking for.
I take my animals to a small farm slaughter house, and the system is nowhere near as mechanised as this, but I will see if they can give me the condition scores and if my estimates improve.
And if you fancy a few more good meaty words in the gralloch mode, you gut a fish, paunch a rabbit and draw a chicken.

Fairs and such

Nothing like a country fair for putting a gleam in the eye and a pain in the pocket. Last night I was at the private view (champagne reception, natch) for the Contemporary Craft Fair down at Bovey Tracey, where us bods in the arts get to swig fizz alongside those with loose wallets and great taste.
In previous years I've been tempted by the jewellery and have returned with yet another chunky one-off bangle, but I have enough, and this time was there to admire the furniture in particular, purely as a voyeur.
And it being fair season, it was off to the Royal Cornwall today, where in utter contrast to Bovey, the stuff in the massive craft tent was nothing to do with craft and everything to do with mass produced tat, but there were plenty of other marvels to enjoy, including some wonderful artisan work if you kept to the smaller stalls.
Although cattle and sheep outside of Cornwall were kept away because of Bluetongue precautions, the livestock was still wondrous to behold and smell (clean, well cared for and warm). And continuing on the strangely coloured proboscis theme, a blue-tongued skink was doing the rounds, as was some species of skunk (skink/skunk, all the same to me).
The high quality of local food was at the fore; yummy Cornish produce was highlighted - lots of wine, cider, beer, cheeses, chocolate, meats of every variety including beautiful salamis, asparagus, preserves, puds, clotted cream and more.
The sheep shearers and the pig handlers competed furiously, one Gloucester Old Spot hurtling happily across the ring, oblivious to its owners cries.
Prizes were awarded for this and that, and the commentators were so well briefed that it sounded as if they knew every competitor and their animal personally.
And then there were the tractors - most far too large and serious for me, but there was one, a refurbed Massey 35 that looked like a Noddy car in agricultural garb, that I could happily give barn room.

First catch your llama

So, yesterday the vet rang and said "your Bluetongue vaccine is ready for collection. Bring a cool box. That'll be £56.04 for sixty doses. Oh, and you'll have to sign a disclaimer for the llama - it isn't really covered by the regs. And once you've opened the vial you have to use the lot within 8 hours."
The llama hasn't been handled for three years. Yes, he feeds from a bowl in my hand during the winter when he gets his goat mix to supplement the greenery he gnaws on (hedges, bushes, trees, hay, grass), but he keeps a wary eye and won't let me stroke him, even after the best part of a decade. He's shy. Luckily he is a self sufficient animal and doesn't have a worm problem or other ailments, so he isn't handled; it would only disturb him. But now I have no choice, and the afternoon is spent arranging gates in as unobtrusive a set-up as possible, so that he can be enticed in to the field shelter and banged to rights. As in earlier times, I intend to lasso him in a corner. He will resist for a moment or two, then kush; sit down and let you do what is needed.
So, today having vaccinated all the sheep and administered a prick of the syringe into my own finger for good measure, there were efforts to get the llama into the shelter. He nibbles from the bucket but as the field is brimful with grasses, he won't go in. Time for a regroup and a rethink. A hoard of neighbours arrive to use the barn to sort fat lambs for market. Six of us take a long rope into the field and slowly corner the llama so he has no choice but to go into the shelter. Gates are shut, three of us go in. I hand over the syringe so I can concentrate on putting a lead rope round his shoulders, but he stands quietly, and before I blink one of the group has injected the 1ml of pink juice with a sharp new needle, and we are done. The llama doesn't even notice.

Yet more firsts - some good, some most definitely not

Last month I was counting off the various firsts of the year to date. Now there are more to add to the list.
This morning there was a heap of straw in the goose hut, pulled and picked into a comfy doughnut shape by one of the geese. I parted it carefully, and yes, the first goose egg of the year. Traditionally they start laying on Valentine's day, so if it was laid before midnight, she was spot on. I'll wait til there are enough eggs to put in the incubator and then let them do their thing by benefit of electricity, leaving the geese to sit naturally on another clutch.

There was the first flush of blossom in the orchard. It is on the unknown tree - I think it is a plum but don't really know - and the reason as to why it never fruits and reveals its true nature is clear; every year it blossoms far too early and the frost will kill off any premature buds. Looks like it's getting it wrong again.
Then there were the two nuthatches eyeing each other up. One of them, the male I guess, was displaying and trembling his tail feathers for all the world as if he was a bird of paradise; never seen that before.
And then on Wednesday I came in to find my first ever ominous recorded phone message from the animal health department of Defra announcing that the farm is in the newly enlarged Bluetongue surveillance zone. To be honest, the chances of doing anything to prevent my sheep getting this disease is nil, and the temptation to bury my head in activity is strong. I know only too well that some midges and mozzies have survived our warm winter. What a way to welcome the lambing season.

April fool

And then I checked. It's September. So I looked again at the Guardian weekend colour supplement, and yes, there really was a two page article (sadly no links to the actual thing) complete with photograph, encouraging you to run backwards with your neck twisted askew in a feeble attempt to stop you from running under a bus, into a grimacing parent with a pushchair and ten carrier bags (sensibly not plastic, must be hessian or linen) or into a lamppost. Apart from the assured bad neck, plentiful bruises and worse, I couldn't get my head round the benefits because I just couldn't take it seriously. I look forward to the letters page next Saturday.
So I hunt down the latest on Foot and Mouth on the Defra website and bang, there is a warning about some disease I've never heard of with a name that sadly yanks the bells on the April Fool's hat; Bluetongue. This is the first time this disease has ever been recorded in the UK. On top of Foot and Mouth it seems rather careless of some straying biting virus-riddled midge that some new notifiable disease has appeared at this time; you might be forgiven for imagining that we are tumbling into a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.
Foot and Mouth scares are starting to emerge outside of Surrey. Those in Norfolk and Solihull have thankfully come to nothing, but now there is another in Hampshire and you can't blame farmers if they start to feel distinctly nervous that the Surrey boundary will not contain the disease for much longer. Rather than limbo, perhaps we are perched in purgatory.