Farmers caught in limbo

Animals have been "imprisoned" on farmland

As each day sees fresh cases of foot-and-mouth disease, BBC News Online special correspondent Mike McKay spoke to one Yorkshire farmer caught up in the effects of the crisis.

Anthony Alton finished filling the feed troughs for 150 ewes and came across to his perimeter fence.

We're facing an accommodation crisis because pigs go on breeding and producing continuously

Anthony Alton
Farmer

Looking back at what he calls "the girls", he said: "They should start lambing by Sunday - but God knows whether we'll ever get them to market.

"The situation is just so desperately uncertain."

Mr Alton keeps 4,500 pigs, 1,000 sheep and a handful of cattle on his 800 acre farm at Kirk Deighton near Wetherby, North Yorkshire.

Animals 'imprisoned'

Like every other livestock farmer, his animals have been "imprisoned" on his land by the movement restrictions.

He managed to ship out 120 pigs last Friday - saying he had a 'tip' about the impending restrictions.

But he normally sends 160 pigs a week to the bacon factory at Malton 35 miles away.

Farmer Anthony Alton rues loss of small abattoirs

For years his weekly routine has been the same.

"Weigh the pigs on Thursday, phone the factory on Friday afternoon and deliver them on Monday morning.

"Now it's all up in the air - and we're facing an accommodation crisis because pigs go on breeding and producing continuously - about 180 a week on this farm," said Mr Alton.

Values plummet

"They also have to be delivered at exactly the right time to meet the rigorous weight requirements of the shops and supermarkets. If we miss that, the value of the animals start to plummet."

The anxious farmer says he may have to move his few cattle out into the winter fields so that the pigs can be moved into their sheds.

"They won't like it - but we'll have no option," he commented.

Farmers also have to observe strict guidelines governing pigs' welfare and accommodation standards - a sore point for many.

We're only a mile or two from the A1 and you get paranoid about lorries passing and maybe carrying the virus

Jane Alton

After all, it was Britain which set the most demanding standards of pig care in Europe in the mid 1990s - adding to farmers' costs at a time when the high pound was making it tough to compete abroad.

"There's been a collapse in pig production, " said Anthony, as he pulled of his boots and stepped into his kitchen.

"Four years ago, 350,000 a week were killed - now it's down to 220,000 a week and well over half of that comes from abroad."

His family have been in farming since the early 1800s. His father started their present farm, together with Anthony's doughty grandmother, in 1932.

But his two grown daughters, whose graduation and wedding pictures adorn the living room, have gone into entirely different careers.

State of siege

He knows he will probably be the last in his branch of the family to run his own farm.

He employs seven staff including Steve Fisher, his head pig-man.

Steve is in what borders on a siege in his tenant farmhouse, having stocked up with plenty of food to save unnecessary journeys off the farm.

A temporary letter box has been attached to a tree at the end of the drive for the postman, and dustmen are collecting from the farm entrance too.

Mr Alton's wife Jane says every hour is an anxious one.

No compensation

"We're only a mile or two from the A1 and you get paranoid about lorries passing and maybe carrying the virus."

Mr Alton's worry is that if he found his farm in an exclusion zone - though with no incidence of disease in his own animals - he would not qualify for compensation even though he was having to feed and finance the stock trapped on his land.

But he is clear about what angers him most - the closure of hundreds of small, local slaughterhouses under government pressure over welfare standards.

"I used the same one for decades, even buying my own meat there occasionally.

"But it was a wicked shame that so many local abattoirs were closed in the 1980s, meaning that today livestock is shipped all over the country for slaughter."