Farming Today
05/10/24 Farming Today This Week: 'Poultry police', dairy recruitment crisis, imported carrots, deer.
Poultry keepers say they can't access government websites to register their birds. From 1st October anyone who keeps birds has to register with the Animal and Plant Health Agency, to help with monitoring bird flu outbreaks, even those with just one or two chickens. Failure to comply could mean a fine of £2,500. However bird owners who've tried to register say the system is not working. Defra says it's had a high number of applications and is working at pace to process them.
Dairy farmers are finding it a 'real struggle' to recruit new staff, according to industry experts, The farmer-owned dairy coop Arla spoke to nearly 500 UK dairy farmers and just under 90% of them said they had advertised jobs and had few or no applicants at all. So what’s holding young people back from a life working with dairy cows in a career that can also involve robotics, veterinary science and data analysis to mention just a few of the skills involved in modern milk production?
The UK is 97% self-sufficient in carrots, according to the British Carrot Association, but poor weather over the last year has meant supermarket shelves stocked with bags of carrots imported from China, Israel and other countries. Is that a trend that’s likely to continue?
We’ve been talking about deer all this week, their impact on the environment and how to manage their growing population.
Presented by Charlotte Smith and produced by Beatrice Fenton.
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Oct 2024
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- other
This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speed slower above 40 gigabytes of detail. Do you ever wonder what your favorite foods come from? And like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maitre de Guelmes-Rajon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. And this season, we're taking an 18-year-old beggar bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that in the most popular cocktail is Margarita, followed by the Mochito from Cuba and the Pinucola from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the Farming Today podcast with me, Charlotte Smith. In this episode, dear and the problems of finding stuff for dairy farms. I don't think they understand the extent to which it's extremely technologically advanced, that the hours can actually be far more flexible. I think the industries come round to that. It is very, very hygienic. We'll also discuss carrot imports. We lost about 15% of our crop to the floods, and customers had to import from Israel. Some even came from China and Egypt. And we'll hear about the joys of using the defra system to register small numbers of poultry. I did my best, and I'm hoping that my hens and I can sleep peacefully, knowing that we're not at risk of prosecution from the poultry police. But let's start with deer, which is the subject we've been talking about all week on our sister program, Farming Today, 545 every weekday morning here on BBC Radio 4, or later on BBC Sounds. Now, there is a lot to talk about with deer, from their impact on the environment, to how to manage their growing population and the demand for venison. Trees and woodlands are, of course, a key tool for combating climate change, improving biodiversity, building flood resilience, and increasing the UK's supply of home-grown timber. But rising numbers of deer make planting more trees and maintaining existing woodlands a challenge, because deer both graze on them and cause damage with their antlers. It can be done, though, reporter Fiona Clampen has been to Priddo Place, a stately home in Cornwall, where Jim Hocking showed her how, by using protective guards and fencing, their estate team is successfully planting new woodland, while also caring for their historic herd of more than a hundred fallow deer. This tree here, this is a home hulk that kicks off the acorns. Yeah. They love to eat them. The small ones, they'll push yourself underneath the gate. Really? They'll stand on their hind legs, yeah. So they're actually trying to climb to get them. They're not going to be patient and wait for them to fall on the ground. Well, some will, but some will. If you see the height, all the same height these trees are. These branches, right? And if we look down, we'll see it better when we go down there. They're all roughly the same height, because they stand on their hind legs. And you'll see them as we go around them. They'll come in there and stand on their hind legs and take it out. Ivy. They love Ivy. It's like chopped up to them. They love it. They love it. Absolutely. Yeah. These are the old English oak trees. And the reason we put these guards around is to protect them from damaging the tree. So, what you're doing to protect the trees is the main challenge, because deer like to rub their antlers, or is it because they want to eat them? No, because they want to just, obviously, in the rut, take out their flustration and take the testosterone high. And they just either rake their antlers up and down a fence, which you'll see there on. Yeah. Oh, they'll come and just rake their antlers up and down and take the bark completely off. And you'll see there you are it. Oh, yeah. And just rake it up and down there. What does that do to the tree? Well, it just kills it, because there's no protection for it, you think? It'll die, eventually, you know. It's the same there. And we can't afford to do that. We've got the different guards. This one, the antlers, just slide up and down. They don't do any damage, you see? It's like a wooden square frame with up and down bars. It's got four sides to put around there and a post in each corner to hold it severe tight. You know, this one is not as effective as we've wanted, but we've learned through experience that this is nowhere near as good as the other ones. The wooden ones. Does it sometimes seem like a battle between deer and tree? If we can cover them in like we did just now, there's not a battle. But sometimes it can be. Any new tree is planted, obviously then they will be protected. Because eventually, I can imagine some of those will be going. And then we have to replace them. What I like to do is plant more out here now and make this a bit of a corpse as well. You see? Why have some of these trees got guards around them and others haven't? Well, because we can't, we just can't do all of them. There's so many to do, and it's so costly, you know? We just do what we can. Because I'm the only person, oh, I get two people come to help me twice a week, other than that, I'm on my own. And you just, you can't do everyone. You do need the cover for the deer. We need the trees. We do need the trees. Desperately. I'd like to put 20 or 30 trees in here. I really do. We do need trees here. As simple as that. I go in there seven days away, Christmas Day, Boxing Day. I know what it can be like in the summer when it's really hot. I know what it can be like in the winter when it's blowing it down, pouring, pouring my rain. They're tough, but they still need cover. Jim Hocking in Cornwall. Six species of deer live wild in the UK, and their numbers are rising. The government ran a consultation into how best to control deer numbers in England back in 2022, with a view to publishing a deer management strategy, but it never materialised. But in Scotland, the government is encouraging land managers to shoot deer in a controlled way to keep numbers down. So far, it's a pilot scheme run in three areas. If it's a success, it could be rolled out nationwide. But there are already questions over whether the extra venison can be handled. Richard Baines has been finding out more. Trees like this, which could be oak seedlings, highly palatable to deer. Jamie Hammond is deer operations manager for the Government Wildlife Agency Nature Scott, trying to keep Scotland's 800,000-odd deer under control. Two of the pilot areas for the incentive scheme are in the Highlands. The third is here, west of Stirling and north of Glasgow. This particular scheme will have a minimum cull rate of four deer per hundred hectares. So the key for that is ensuring the additionality. We're not going to pay for what people are already doing. So essentially, if their farm's a hundred hectares, they need to shoot four females and juveniles first, and then deer's number 5, 6, 7 and onwards, there would be an additional payment for that, which is 70 pounds per female, 35 pounds per juvenile. A new mobile app will let stalkers log each animal's shot. The development of the whole incentive approach, the processes, the systems that we've developed, that's key in effectively allowing us to see would this kind of thing work if it was used at a national scale. It's a 308 calibre, it's the whole time, put the magazine in, then life will become his life. Alan Kirk is a part-time stalker, helping the local farmer keep deer numbers down. He's signed up for the pilot. It gives you a benefit if you know that there's something coming back. You can afford the fuel to get to the places you have to get to, and everything that can offset what you're having to put out to begin with is good. Deer managers in the Highlands are already calling for a nationwide extension to the scheme. But here in the lowlands, where stalkers like Alan may take only three or four animals a year to give meat to family and friends, it's not so straightforward. I had the old dairy. When it became redundant, we converted it into anything heavy units. Farmer John Bruce chairs the lowland deer network, a stalking group which covers the sterling shell pilot. He welcomed it, but he warned that small operators will find regulations get in the way of shooting extra animals. As soon as he intends to either provide it to a venison dealer or to try and process it for public use, he has to enter the regulation ladder, which starts with his premises being registered with the local authority. If he's going to sell anything he produces himself to anybody else, he must procure a venison dealer's license. The introduced cost of possibly about £300 for the venison dealer's license and maybe £7,500 to spend on a chill. Alan Kirk has one answer to that. It would be nice if there was possibly a community alarm that made it available. They've done something similar down south and that has helped with the problems they have. But stalkers will have to organise that themselves after the Scottish government scrapped proposals to subsidise such a scheme. It's facing £500 million budget cuts to balance its books and said it had considered deer larders as part of its efforts to boost the cull, but had been unable to fund such infrastructure. I think it's a missed opportunity that enough a lot of the stalkers in this area especially could make use of if I had an opportunity to shoot more deer here and take it to a local establishment where I knew it was going to go through the system, it would be much easier to shoot more deer. Alan Kirk ending that report from Richard Baines. More on deer on BBC Sounds just search for farming today. Now as promised, carrots. We grow 700,000 tonnes a year across 9,000 hectares in the UK. We're 97% self-sufficient in them according to the British Carrot Association. But poor weather over the last year has meant supermarket shelves stocked with bags of carrots imported from China, Israel and other countries. Is that then a trend that's likely to continue? Well, some of the UK's biggest carrot producers met this week, appropriately enough in a carrot field, to discuss amongst other things innovations in growing techniques and new varieties. Roger Hobson is chair of the British Carrot Growers Association, and Kazgrim asked him first about how the weather is affecting the current crop. This year's crop is looking great from a quality point of view and OK on a volume point of view. The floods last year were a nightmare, and so that led to late planting. So we thought it was going to knock on to this year, but the weather's been kind to carrots, so probably the unbalanced average on volume, but good on quality. Well, we had several emails from listeners over the last few months really, asking why they were seeing carrots imported from overseas. Do growers find it really hard to keep up with demand when the weather has been bad, or are imported carrots just cheaper for retailers? No, no, imported carrots are much dearer. We lost about 15% of our crop to the floods. As a result, there was a six-week period where we, on our farm, couldn't supply our customers, and customers had to import from France, Spain, Israel. Some even came from China and Egypt. And is it the retailers who do that importing, you don't import them yourself to ensure that you are meeting the contracts that you have with your supermarkets or whoever? It's very often the packing company that does the importing, so we were dealing with overseas carrot growers and having foreign carrots into our farm for processing on for some of our customers. Yep, keep them going. Typically, these imported carrots were working at three times the price of a UK carrot at that time of year. How challenging is it to make a profit from carrots? Because they have very specific growing needs, don't they? Like, for example, you can't grow them in the same field year on year. You have to leave a decade between crops because of disease risk, don't you? That's the challenge, and we have to plan a long time in advance to do this. You know, we're already talking to the farmers whose farms we're growing our carrots on. You know, it's just about next year, but the year after we have long-term plans in place, it's a long-term business, it's not the hardest thing to do isn't growing a carrot because they're really suited to the British maritime climate as long as the weather plays fair with us and we don't get sort of 40 degrees and the worst drought for a century or the worst floods ever like last year. I mean, the problem is that there doesn't ever seem to be a normal year and a normal climate. What kinds of mitigation a carrot farmer is looking at to try and accommodate the changing weather patterns that we seem to be having now? Here on my farm, we're doing more drainage. I've got a drainage contract in at the moment. I'm going to improve the drainage in the field where we're going to be going carrots in 2026. We're covering more carrots up with straw to protect them against the frost in the winter. It's an expensive process, but we've had some serious pre-Christmas frosties the last two years that have spoiled the quality. We've got to keep that carrot as good as possible so our customers want him. Roger Hobson there from the British Carrot Growers Association. Dairy farmers are finding it a real struggle to recruit new staff that's according to industry experts. The farmer owned dairy co-op, Arla, spoke to nearly 500 UK dairy farmers and just under 90% of them said they'd advertised jobs and had had few or no applicants at all. This week at the Dairy Show, a large industry event at the Bath and West Showground in Somerset, they devoted a whole day to seminars around finding ways to boost recruitment. So what's holding young people back from a life working with dairy cows? In a career that can also involve computing, veterinary science and data analysis. BBC West's business and environment correspondent Dave Harvey was at the show and he told Caz that some rather outdated stereotypes around early mornings, muck and hard manual work are as much to blame as anything. Well if I told you there was an industry here that uses robotics, that uses artificial intelligence, that uses green tech, I wonder how many people would go, you're talking about milking cows. I think that's kind of the problem really, the perceptions and the reality. People still think it's a very mucky industry and yes, muck is involved because after all muck is money and dairy, but there's also a lot of tech involved as well. And what they're telling me is basically it's a real struggle to get young people to really get involved. Now of course there are some young people loving the dairy life, like for instance Emily and Georgie Paul. Now their sisters, they're both in their early 20s and they're now working very much on their family dairy farm out in Somerset on the Mendip Hills, really kind of working towards taking over from Dad, who's increasingly doing less and less. And I met them out on the hill surrounded by their freezing herd. You can't beat being out here in the sunshine on a lovely day when the weather's nice with these beautiful creatures around us. It is great, a group of mental health, a great physical health. It's not a nine to five, it's a lifestyle, but I really wouldn't be doing anything else, living anywhere else, working anywhere else. We're working racing for six, seven years after leaving school. And that was great, I learnt loads, met some really good friends, travelled all over, done a stint in America and all up and down this country. And it was great, but you just can't beat it here with the family and farming and cows. It's just the best you could ever find really. The price straw, the price of everything has just gone up incredibly, and our milk price has just been so slow to rise with it. It just causes cash flow issues and generally it's hard work to make it keep it going, but wouldn't change it, wouldn't beat it. Well if the dairy industry is really struggling to get new people, that family there, they are obviously the exception Dave, enjoying it as they are. What do dairy industry leaders tell you is going wrong? Well in a way, there's too much of that. Emily and Georgie are the daughters of the guy who owns the farm. It's just a small farm, they have a couple hundred head. And that's the main way that young people are going into dairying now. It's very much picking up from mum and dad. And they're trying to get people to come across who've never farmed, who've maybe been in totally different bits of either agricultural industry or her young people, students from an urban background who are interested in conservation, who are interested in science, but haven't begun to think about going into farming. Load of seminars at the dairy show here down in Septon Mallet at the Royal Bath and West Showground. They've gone for it, they've called them, standby, utterly agricultural careers. There's quite a lot more involved to be honest in all the branding. Really? Yeah they obviously want the industry to get a move on. They're doing it all, they're doing it all. Dairy has more puns than anything else. I met Ruthie Peterson, she is a careers advisor for an institute of agriculture. And she told me that basically it's an increasing struggle to get young people to apply. I don't think they understand the extent to which in modern day that it's extremely technologically advanced, that the hours can actually be far more flexible. I think the industry's come round to that, it's very, very hygienic. You know the technology is involved, they're incredible. We've got the carving sensors, we've got robotic milking, we've got gate analysis, and we've got analysis of big data. All these things require a lot of skills to operate. And that message has now been taken to Westminster by amongst other people, the local MP Sarah Dyke, who's the MP for Glastonbury and Street. And she's actually from a farming background herself, and she really wants lots of people to think about farming in a very different way. I was working alongside Summer Science, which is a STEM festival to encourage more younger people into STEM careers. And agriculture is exactly that. And we should be encouraging people who are looking for science, technology, engineering and mathematical careers to embrace farming as a potential career. And Dave, are there many young people at the show? And any people who are going to be taking all that on board? There are some young people, especially some volunteers. And what was encouraging to me, I thought, was people who've not grown up on farms. People like Azra Anzar, now she is a vet student from a big city, no contact with farms at all. She founds her being a vet. And then when she went on a farm, she found she absolutely loved it. What does Azra love most? Well, you're never going to guess. Probably scraping food. It's quite calming, actually. But also just getting to help the animals and then see them running around the next day. The calves are just overgrown puppies. I think it's really healing to just get to be outdoors all the time and then have that be part of your job as well. Azra Anzar, they're giving the answer that I think no one expected to that question from Dave Harvey, reporting from The Dairy Show. Well, Hugh Cantor, who tells us he's worked in derrying for more than 40 years from managing herds to teaching, got in touch about that. He describes problems with recruitment as chickens coming home to roost, saying that farmers expect their staff to work in appalling conditions for low pay. Though he also points out he's worked for some really good people. He says that as the home often goes with the job, it's hard for staff to move. Well, let us know your thoughts on that. We're farming.today@bbc.co.uk or you can tweet us on X where we are at BBC Farming today. And a lot of people did just that on hearing this. As of this week, all owners of poultry in England and Wales, even if it's just one hen in your back garden, must be registered with the Animal and Plant Health Agency. It's so that all birds can be traced in the event of an avian flu outbreak. Well, until now, only poultry flocks in England and Wales of more than 50 birds had to be registered. Failure to comply could mean a fine of £2,500 pounds. In Scotland, poultry owners have until the 1st of December. Now, this can all be done online through the Defra website. More on the challenges that poses later. Some owners, though, of small flocks say it's unfair that they have to comply in just the same way as poultry farms housing almost a million birds. Lindsey Smith from BBC Look North reports. Then I'll put that down there. They're tread more like pets than poultry. Six rescue hens who live on an allotment off a busy hazel road. They're now registered. Here's their owner, Ray Holmes. I don't think we should be penalized on a smaller plot like this when we've got wildlife flying all over. There's geese flying over in the morning now. They're going away. Who knows what's dropping from the sky? The deadline to register is a hot topic here, as is the penalty if you don't. Derek Smith has four rescue hens. Here we go for the date. And we have four eggs. Quite a high risk of a £2,500 poundfine. I think it's just bureaucracy gone crazy, yeah. It's hoped the register will enable the government to quickly inform keepers if there's another bird flu outbreak. The winter of 2021 to 22 saw the worst on record. George Martin Almagro is the UK's deputy chief veterinary officer. It's a top priority because if we do not know where those vets are kept, then we have to spend resources in trying to find them. Actually, we're also trying to deal with the disease. There is a threat out there of avian influenza. As we know, it's in wild birds, and it's been already making an impact in certain parts of Europe. And that risks the supply of the nation's favourite meat. I produce for Sainsbury's. We produce meat birds around about 7 million a year. James Porter runs one of Lincoln's biggest poultry farms with a flock of 880,000 birds. We weren't allowed inside James's chicken sheds. They take the spread of viruses so seriously. But he says it's vital to register after watching fellow farmers whose birds caught the disease. I know what kind of effect these diseases can have on people's livelihoods. It took their whole flock out of production and they had to come back from that, or most potentially didn't come back at all. Come on girls, this way. The government say they want to encourage rather than enforce this law ultimately to remain disease free. Lindsay Smith there from BBC Look North. Well, as I say, that prompted a lot of people to contact farming today to tell us of the trials and tribulations of using the online defra system. Kyle Bell keeps chickens on his allotment in County Durham and spoke to Anna Hill about his frustration. So I've got 18 hens, one rooster and six ducks. Most of us are on a Facebook group and I got a notification about two weeks ago saying that you need to register your birds, but I hadn't done it straight away so I waited about a week. And then when I went on the gov.uk website that they gave us a link to, it wouldn't let you verify your email address. So I tried about 15 to 20 times on the first day. On the second day, I tried again, it didn't work, but on the third day, they said that the service is not available. Are they registered now? Have you managed to do it? I did just check and it's still not working. Well, Beryl Melton told us that she has tried no less than three times to register her three chickens. Could you ask defra? How many hours of my life and taxpayers' money do they wish to waste? She asks. On her last attempt at lunchtime on Tuesday, she gave up after she was timed out and she got the verification code at 11 minutes past nine on Tuesday night. Robert Wharton describes this as the usual incompetence we have to deal with, as he says, to register you have to have a code, which, as we've heard, doesn't arrive. Well, Michael Pollard in Norfolk also found the registration system ineffective, that's the polite version, and spent hours trying to sort it out. In all, over two consecutive days, I spent nearly 17 hours wedded to my screen, receiving a total of 11 codes, including the last one at 11 o'clock one night. And I'm afraid at that moment, I just had enough. Did you manage to talk to the APHA, the Animal and Plant Health Agency? Well, in desperation after many, many hours, I thought I would try, and I wasn't expecting anything until I delight. I was only third in the queue, and I spoke to a really helpful colleague from Defra at the APHA. And she promised to send me an email with a link, which she duly did. But again, it's not actually that easy to fill in their email linked form. So I did my best, and I'm hoping that my hens and I can sleep peacefully, knowing that we're not at risk of prosecution from the poultry police. Michael Pollard there in Norfolk. Well, in a statement, Defra told us, we've received a high number of applications and are working at pace to process these. And they've asked people not to submit more than one application. You can still register by completing the form and submitting it to the customer registration team by email or post. That's it from us, I'm Charlotte Smith, the producer is Beatrice Fenton, and farming today is a BBC audio Bristol production. Do you ever wonder what your favorite foods come from? Like, what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maita Gomez-Rajon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is Back. And this season, we're taking an organ bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that the most popular cocktail is Margherita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba and the Pinucula from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music)