2 Sept 2020
Don’t worry about what you can’t control
Roger Evans returns with thoughts on the pandemic and TB, in his latest Dairy Diary.

Image © Petr Ciz / Adobe Stock
Two big things are in my life at present. The first – and the one I share with everyone else – is the pandemic and lockdown.
Living on a farm, I consider myself fortunate. Everything in life is relative, so if I compare myself with a lot of other people, I am fortunate indeed.
I am very lucky to live in a beautiful part of the country, so being restricted to where I live is no great hardship. The farm goes on with its year regardless of any crisis; grass grows (occasionally) and has to be grazed or harvested.
To all intents, your farming life goes on very much as it went before. The pandemic has crashed the price of milk, but we can’t do anything about that.
You should never spend time worrying about things you can do nothing about.
Business as usual
I don’t feel exposed to the virus because most days I only speak to half a dozen people.
I don’t think I’ve been in a shop for three or four years. I used to go in supermarkets regularly, but that was only to check the prices of the dairy products and which had a special offer on. I used to pick up a basket as a sort of prop, but I never put anything in it.
Birthdays, Christmases and Father’s Days provide me with most of the clothes I need. If I need cash, which isn’t often these days, I give my wife my bank card (which is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done) – and on the rare occasions I need to buy anything, I buy it online.
My two eldest grandsons live here on the farm and they buy everything online; I am now on first name terms with several white van drivers.
It’s strange that I buy things online in preference to shops because I have always deplored the closure of local bank branches, which is much the same sort of thing. I console myself by saying that no one ever kept a shop open on what I have bought.
I have a history of espousing lost causes. Years ago, if I wanted some pocket money I used to go into my local branch and cash a cheque. For years I refused to use a cashpoint. I used to go to the counter (the ladies there all happened to be farmers’ wives or daughters), they would give me my cash and would always say: “There’s no need for you to come in here for cash, you can get some in the machine outside.” And I would say: “If everyone uses the machine they won’t need you anymore.”
I was right about that – the branch closed, and the next one… I’m on my fourth branch now and I don’t even know where it is.
TB during tough times
The other big thing in my life is our next TB test. It’s not for three months, but we are preparing now. Some of the preparations are not what we would choose to do – they are things we feel driven to do; the sort of things we have to do to try to survive these difficult times.
Some of them are not best practice, but don’t judge us. We will not be doing anything illegal, it’s just that three generations are working on this farm, and we want that to continue.
We farm organically, we don’t cut any trees down, we don’t want expensive cars or holidays – we just w
ant to continue with our way of life just where we are living. Is that wrong?
The worst case scenario is that we will fail the test – and we are preparing for just that, because that is a real possibility. But it would get worse than that. If we were to lose out on a big hit to our milking herd – say 10 cows – there is no way we could achieve our budgets for this financial year.
The budgets were already tight, so if we lost 10 cows that would be really serious. Just how long we would be short of cows is anyone’s guess; it could be years before we were allowed to restock. This is what we have done.
We have bought some cows; these will put us over what we need. If you like, we are buying cows before we lose them. Our preference would be to run a closed herd, but more of that later.
We have about six cull cows to go, but that’s how we got into trouble with TB last time. We sent some cull cows off, and one of them had TB lesions at slaughter and we were closed down. Therefore, we are going to sell all the calves we can before we sell the cull cows.
An order to it all exists that is driven by the threat of being closed down. You buy some cows, you sell some calves. Then, and only then, you send off the cows for slaughter. Sending off cull cows is almost like a mini TB test; it’s a blow if one goes down, but the movement restrictions that will swiftly follow are a bigger blow.
But we will not have to buy cows, because of the threat of TB, every year. We presently rear just enough replacement heifers to maintain herd numbers as we want them. We have taken the decision to rear another 10 a year just in case TB raises its ugly head again. I do not parade this decision as a negative.
We will go, whatever happens, back to being a closed herd. This is something we aspire to for the long-term health benefits. The extra heifers come on stream next year so, with luck, this will be the final time we have to buy any cows.
Costs
The cost of TB is often expressed in terms of the thousands of cattle slaughtered. But that’s not the half of it. There’s the cost of the actual testing and the disruption that causes. There’s the cost of buying those extra cows; we didn’t have the money to do that so we had to borrow even more. I don’t see the rearing of more heifers as a negative, but there’s still a cost to it and it will stretch resources, and we wouldn’t have to do it if it wasn’t for TB.
I can’t do anything about the price of milk – not personally, anyway. Just as I can’t do anything about TB. But I can mitigate some of the effects of TB. How you quantify the anxiety, I’ve no idea.
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