September started well, after all the rain in July and Foot and Mouth ‘appearing’ to be under control, things started looking optimistic.  The combines came and harvested the oats and beans, the oats came off well but the beans were full of weed so that was not so much fun. 
 
Then Foot and Mouth came back, it had apparently been unobserved on a farm for 4 weeks.  So the lifting of the movement ban was back and the export market – needless to say was dead in the water too. 
 
September is the month that we see the sheep sales, Hawes Auction Mart in particular see a lot of breeding sheep and ram sales this month – all that was cancelled.  Well it may be a simple job of keeping the sheep on farm until the movement bans are lifted – but a lot of farmers have no winter forage or space to keep them.
 
If farmers have no space or food to keep them, and the intended market for them has collapsed, then there is only one other place for them – and that’ s the fat market. 
 
This is where we come in... Last week we took some fat lambs to market, we knew the trade was bad, but we have the same problem as most, they eat food that we can’t really afford.  But trade wasn’t just bad it was terrible!  We averaged £30/fat lamb, which meant we lost £10/lamb as we can only make money on selling lambs at £40/lamb.
 
What is so frustrating about this is the fact that without Foot and Mouth, none of this would have happened.
 
So October became a steady month for us – we were watching the news for any development on Foot and Mouth, but what came was a bigger shock – Bluetongue!  The first ever case in the UK, we were hoping it would stay in Europe and not come to England, but I guess we were just to tempting a nation and the midges couldn’t help themselves.
 
Hopefully Pirbright and Merial can come up with a vaccine quickly and in the meantime, no more foot and mouth disease will be reported in their surrounding area or anywhere else in the UK for that matter.
 
At least Simon managed to drill his mustard, whichprovides a green manure for the in-conversion organic arable fields and the contractors ploughed the land going into organic conversion this year for drilling grass and red clover, which has now been done and the fields are a lovely green colour once again!