By Charles Bourns, broiler grower, Gloucestershire
This is the time of year for shows where I can catch up with my next door neighbours who are always busy silageing or in the farm shop. It is always time when you hear how other parts of farming are doing as it is very easy to get cocooned in our sector and forget about the rest.
So what have I found out? Potatoes are in surplus, beef prices are down and those who bought expensive store cattle are losing up to £400 per head when sold. Milk is well down but is beginning to recover which is good news, pigs are on the floor due to swine fever in Spain for some reason but sheep, poultry and eggs are doing well.
The big frustration in our sector is the difficulty in getting planning for new houses. This may be a good thing as it could help keep prices up but bad as it is encouraging imports.
Another thing I found out is that off Devon and South Cornwall there is an octopus plume which is destroying the lobster catch. In fact one fisherman has been out twice and caught three lobsters and 510kg of octopus in his 40 pots. Apparently, this phenomenon has been caused by warm waters in the winter as cold waters kill the eggs. It has happened four times in the past century.
It is interesting what stories catch the imagination of the public. This month it was the story of white eggs being better for hen welfare and the eggs’ carbon footprint being lower, which is true for – amongst other reasons – hens now producing to 100 weeks plus and laying 500 eggs.
I am interested to see how the NFU’s Love Chicken Campaign was received and what coverage it had. It is very important that it has succeeded in its aim to promote chicken sales to the public and not just promote to the industry to itself.
At home my son has been making sure the farm is ready for the summer heatwaves by replacing fan motors twice. The first ones burnt out in two days so we have changed supplier and hopefully these will last longer. It is very frustrating when these things happen.
The last crop went out well and the fact we vaccinate for cocci seems to have removed our cocci niggle that we had which has improved our podo and hock results. It also saves us a little bit of money compared with having it in the feed.
We did forget to have our health plan updated but we were luckily reminded by our agricultural compliance manager, thus avoiding a non-compliance in our audit. I also see we can now do some of the modules for the poultry passport online. This is great news especially as most modules I am doing for the third time (and some even more). It should make it much easier for me to keep up to date. It’s just a pity we cannot have some grandfather rights.
Putting my other hat on Nfsco now has an addition to its system that can show the collectors the movement of their lorries in real time. This we believe will be useful especially in disease situations and traceability. It also shows if lorries are crossing their tracks so can save money and fuel. We also have a farmer app where the farmer can log his need for a collection online. This automatically goes to his collector who will arrange it to be done. It is so easy to forget to ring later, so we hope these measures will improve efficiency all around.