The End of British Farming?

As the autumn sun dips behind the nearby tree lined hill and with the evening chill setting in, Simon Peace props himself up against the gate leading into his field of cows to absorb the divine orchestra of twilight hues shifting gradually before him.

"It's marvellous on a day like today. Makes it all worth it," the cattle owner reflects. Happily married for twenty of his 56 years and with three adult children, farming has been a part of the Peace family for three generations. "My dad always kept cows, and his mother – my grandma – came from a family of stock farmers from the West Country. Of course, it's not like it was."

Simon's current herd of eight Devon and Normande cows have plodded over and now surround their owner as if to listen in on his ruminations, enveloping us both in a pungent cloud of bovine breath and urine vapour.

"Farmers are depressed, everyone's depressed. You go to market – I went today – and the look on everyone's faces says it all."

Livestock farmers like Simon are going through hard times. Still reeling from the devastation of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic during which over 3 million cattle were exterminated and a Europe-wide ban on UK meat sales was imposed overnight, they are now having to deal with the outbreak of bluetongue disease, a non-contagious virus spread by midges. "It seems like it's just one damn thing after another in this game," Simon laments.

With bluetongue-affected areas growing by the day, the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has divided the country into protected and open-movement zones. Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Hampshire and Kent are currently the four corners of the protected zone, but the boundaries are shifting by the day as the virus spreads. Within the protected zone, areas where new cases have been discovered are subject to "control", "restriction" or "surveillance", depending on the severity of the local situation.

For Simon, this arrangement is unnecessarily complicated and is doing nothing to stop the spread of the disease.

"If I go to Salisbury market I can sell to buyers from within the protected zone, but not to those from further west beyond the zone boundary. Do you think that those midges can't cross from one zone into another? They might as well make the whole country a protected zone and let us get on with a bit of trading. It's going to end up that way anyway."

Nobody is quite sure where the bluetongue epidemic is going to end. But with Simon having recently made just £100 profit on a herd of six cows he kept since last winter, his children have not been drawn to follow in their father's footsteps.

"I can't blame them," he says shaking his head, "there's no money in it now."

So is this the end of British farming?

"I don't honestly know. But something's got to change. If not, this year will be remembered as the beginning of the end."

____

This piece was an assignment for Peter Jackson - a short context interview with an individual of our choosing. It received the following marks (out of 5 for each section):

Anecdotes: 0
Information: 4
Description: 1
Speech: 3

TOTAL: 8 / 20 (pretty damn poor!)

I think I was getting a bit confused between feature writing and news writing. It's a bit tricky to switch from one mindset to the next, and wrote this piece straight after a news writing lesson with Dan. Well that's my excuse, anyway. Watch this space for the forthcoming rewrite.