Gut and Lung Worms

This has turned out to be a wet summer. There is plenty of fodder although it can be frustrating if you need to make any hay. Wet fields mean wet feet and this has a tendency to soften the feet of sheep and leave them vulnerable to scald and other foot problems. Parasites thrive in these conditions. Worms need moisture and warm conditions to complete their life cycles. When it is dry bowel and lungworm larvae are largely trapped in the ground so their hosts have a period where they take in only small numbers of infected larvae. Not this year, intakes will be at saturation point and the natural defences of the host may be over whelmed. You may well find that stock need an extra dose of wormer this year particularly if you have had problems with lungworm in the past.

Monitoring Fluke

It is always difficult to find out what is happening with fluke. This is a parasite that is on the increase, because of the difficulties with treatments and restricting the host snails when you are encouraged to have environmental schemes on your farms. In the past part of the problem was difficulties identifying animal with chronic fluke that act as a reservoir each year to infect the rest of your herd or flock. Abattoir reports are useful to keep a check on this disease, but they are not always available depending on how you sell your stock. Adult fluke do not pass eggs every day so if there are just a few in the liver and individual animal sample are taken they can sometimes be missed and few people go to the trouble of taking more sample for a second and third day, just to be sure.

New Test

There is now a new ELISA test that can be done on faeces either from individual animals or groups that is more reliable to check for low levels of infection. This will be useful for monitoring purposes as it gives a better indication if there is no infection present and will help to determine the best time to treat the flock.

My Holiday

I’ve been on holiday this month. Partly on my bike, I cycled from home up the west coast of Scotland so we could spend the second week on Orkney. Orkney has its own weather. It is often windy there but it changes so quickly, we were lucky it was a lot drier than the weather that was forecast. As I cycled up through Cheshire and Lancashire it was quite noticeable how the maize fields start to disappear and the crops they contain are two to three weeks behind the ones that grow here. I didn’t have to travel very far before the badgers which are familiar road traffic casualties here were replaced by flattened hedgehogs. It is always sad to see that animals have been caught out on the roads, I did come across a dead deer in the middle of a road in the highlands of Scotland. It might well be that when the hedgehogs disappear there are too many badgers and the diseases that they carry will soon follow.

Controlling Unwanted Wildlife

On a bike I tend to notice things that you can easily miss in a car. There were several places in Lancashire and Southern Scotland where there were warnings that red squirrels are about. Hopefully motorists take care to avoid them. Smaller notices give the telephone numbers of different people to contact if any grey squirrels are seen. I am not sure how the grey ones are controlled without harming the smaller reds but there certainly doesn’t seem to be any problem about tilting the balance in favour of our native species.

Open Spaces

The Highlands are beautiful. The scenery changes every ten minutes and there are vast areas of land that are left with no cattle, no sheep just deer, heather and the occasional forest. In some areas it is quite noticeable how many buildings have been abandoned and how sparsely populated the countryside is. There is a lot of fishing in the Highlands and I should imagine large areas where grouse are shot, although I wasn’t aware of them.

Cheap Fish is not Good

There was a fish and chip shop we visited in Ullapool that had a notice up stating that ‘Cheap Fish is not Good for you. Cheap Fish is not Good’. How true that is and the fish they sell was far different to what we have become accustomed to here. In many ways it would be good to substitute the word Milk in place of the Fish. I wouldn’t want to imply that the milk that you produce could ever be of a poor quality, it certainly isn’t. It is so wrong that milk cannot be given a value it justly deserves.

Difficult Conditions

On Orkney much of the land if farmed. The grow Barley. Some Oats and lots of grass. Whenever I go there I have been impressed by the quality of the beef cattle most of the bulls look like they have just come back from a show and their off spring have out grown the dry stone walls and fences that contain them. There are trees in some places on the islands but no hedges. There are also several Dairy farms on Mainland Orkney. It is always windy and, by most reports they have not had a very good year as it was so windy in February and March. So far none of the barley has been harvested much of it is far from ready. The oat fields are still green and it is difficult to think that they will ever be ready to harvest.

Controlling and Encouraging Birds

There are huge numbers of birds on the islands. There are geese everywhere and we saw several splendid scare crows but they seemed to have little effect. In one area I saw eight or nine fields of barley each with a car or van left in the middle of the crop. Whether this has an effect on the geese I am not sure. They do have Corncrakes in some areas. When the grass is cut for silage early in the year the always start from the outside and leave a large area uncut in the middle of the field for the birds. This may not be a very efficient way to manage the grass, but some birds have to take priority over four footed animals on the farms.

Orkney Brewery

One morning we went on a tour of the Orkney Brewery. The company has taken over an old village school. The main school buildings are used as a shop and restaurant, the actual brewery in in a modern building about the same size attached to the school. We were shown the stainless steel vessels in which the various beers are brewed, everything was spotless and they were well used to visitors. I was surprised to hear that the barley grown in Scotland is used mainly for distilling so they buy their main ingredient from England. The hops come from various sources and the skill of the brewer is to get the right blend of hops so they can produce a consistent product. The hops come in a pelleted form that looks remarkably like what we would feed to cattle. During the process the yeast swells in volume and is harvested from the various vats with a shovel so that it can be used for the next batch. The brewery is good at marketing its products. They are keen to enter various competitions as it helps with the export market. They sell their beers in America and Japan and are keen to develop new markets.

Home Produced?

Once the process has come to an end the beer is transferred to containers and transported on a lorry to Manchester where it is bottled or sealed in barrels before being distributed across the country and abroad. It must be expensive to run a business from such a remote location with the challenges of the transport links. Essentially the only thing that comes from Orkney itself is the water and the expertise.

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