Farmer's - a question

Maybe they didn't check the forecast, maybe they don't have anywhere else to put them, maybe they didn't think it would be so bad, maybe they couldn't be bothered...?

Whatever the answer, its a damn good question.

There is simply NO excuse for not protecting your animals.
 
It's march and I guess alot of them got caught out with how much snow we had and how long it's lasted for.....also alot of farmers don't have enough indoor space for all their animals, sheep are made to live outside anyway !
 
RoseGrey said:
There is simply NO excuse for not protecting your animals.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's that simple myself. The weather has been very extreme in areas not used to snow, it came down very quickly (overnight) in some areas and it hasn't gone away!

I vaguely remember my parents sheep and cattle having to have air dropped fodder in the 1960's. Providing my memory is right, I don't remember enough buildings to house them all even if they could have got them in.
 
I think the majority don't have the space to bring all livestock inside, especially sheep, when you are lambing 700+ ewes... they come in to lamb in batches and are back out within a few days of lambing.
 
Hardly anybody will have enough buildings to house ALL their sheep, especially with lambing in full swing, the ewe lambs, barrens and late lambers just have to rough it out. I would also imagine that nobody expected it to be THAT bad, sheep can survive in snow etc.
Anyway, my thoughts are with those fighting to find and recover their stock :(
 
I am glad you have brought this up,I am fed up of looking at sheep near us lame, left out in all weathers with no feed shelter.
Huge sheds standing empty and food on site sheep screaming at me when they see me feeding horses.

When we had the bad snow a couple of years ago we were left feeding sheep as the person who owned them used to come and check on them every couple of months if that.
There is even a person who has been banned who is keeping them in somebody else's name, I know not all farmers are like this but we see so much sheer neglect and my dad always comments he does not want to comeback as a sheep in another life.

Half of them near us do not even do basic checking we are always having to get them up on there feet after being down for so long and gassing up,we have also found them with eyes pecked out etc so the fact many were not brought in does not surprise me in the least.
It is very frustrating and depressing.:(
 
Nice question- not always possible and actually iv seen a few stories on news of the ones being bought in buildings collapse so they are stuck anyway.
The large amount of snow is unheard of for a long time in many areas hit by it. I live just on edge staffs moorlands and only once in past 30 years has there been drifts like this in my area. So people have been caught out i certainly didn't expect to wake up to 10ft snow drifts on majority of roads and even now most roads are down to single track not double.
My thoughts are with the farmers and volunteers helping dig them out and save what they can- when the thaw happens that will be a sad time for lots of sheep farmers.
 
TF that's a shame but not common practice, sheep are hardy and designed to withstand all weather. My YO brings her small flock in every winter and it drives me mad as its not what they need! They do have feed out tho.
These farmers on tv are devastated and it couldn't have happened at a worse time with lambing in full swing. Poor things.
 
I don't think anyone could have predicted just how cold and how much snow there was going to be. Snow can get deep very quickly and with the wind blowing there are soon big snowdrifts.

This time of year is usually OK, the worst of the winter is over - it is spriing after all. Lambs are OK in cold weather, it is the combination of cold, wet, wind that kills them.
It is unusally cold, the grass hasn't grown, farmers can't house all their sheep, the snow came on quickly.

Adult sheep are supposed to live out - they have a thick fleece and many would say that it is more healthy for the lambs to be born outside (in a normal year). It is extreme weather that leads to adult sheep dying - and this has been extreme.

Every dead lamb is a loss, and the end of 12 months of work of caring for the sheep. It will be another 12 months to wait before another lambing.

AS for the farmer above - these tend to take grass keep for several hundred sheep and live a long way away from the flock and yes, they often don't care much. It is probably cheaper for them to take the losses of lame sheep or dead ones than to call the vet.
 
I do keep telling myself it is not common practice but it is not an isolated incidence or even one person, you are right about it being cheaper to just leave them to die and absorb the losses but they are living animals and my father has never kept animals like this nor would he ever.

As for the person who never came to check he asked us would we,yes I did and did expect nothing in return but he would not even come when needed or even to pick up or dispose of the deadstock.

I honestly do think welfare of animals is getting worse not better at the moment.
 
amymay said:
Why did farmers leave stock on the land, rather than bring them in when the heavy snow started?
Click to expand...

Do you really think that farmers have the facilities to bring hundreds of sheep inside. These sheep that you have seen on television, in front of your fire no doubt, are hill sheep. They are bred to lamb outside, the weather was predicted but what can they do in freak conditions. The commitment to lamb in march was when the ram was put to the ewes in the autumn. These farmers are mostly hill farmers and dont have the luxury of huge agricultural buildings to lamb inside. The losses of indoor lambing due to infection, miss mothering and scour are rife. I take exception to the posters who are blaming farmers for what they are thinking is neglect. This has been a terrible time for sheep farmers and they are working around the clock in this disasterous lambing season.
 
We haven't the room the ones which lambed Jan early feb are out in fields to make room for next group, then when lambs are at foot need extra room, buildings are expensive and not always allowed to build them. Every business has to run close to capacity to earn a living, same as why doesn't all horse places store all hay for winter, some can some can't, plus lots of hill sheep are never housed, we are midlands and have lost a few lambs due to a combination of wet cold and snow, heard of one farmer picked up 75 lambs.
 
I agree with other posters - most farmers simply haven't got the sheds to put them in. My sis-in-law is a sheep farmer and they don't have any sheds except an open sided barn to store hay, and a couple of old stables that they house the dogs, feed and other bits and bobs in. Most years they have a handful of ewes and lambs inside the stables, usually the orphan lambs and surrogate mums.

I blame the media hype. As soon as a single snowflake falls on a pavement anywhere in the UK, the journalists wet themselves to cover the 'story' and tell us how we are all going to freeze to death. Most of us look like this :rolleyes: when we watch the news.
 
I think a huge part of the problem was the strong easterly wind causing massive drifts, the sheep shelter by hedges/walls etc and sadly they have been buried in the drifts. I understand that there are also a lot of cattle in the same predicament. The main problem is that if they are not dug out then any that survive being buried in the drifts (and they do survive it quite often) will drown when it thaws. I feel so sorry for the farmers affected and hope that local communities are rallying round to help them dig out where possible. Sheep are hardy and should be able to live out without a problem, for those farmers that do have barn space I would imagine that the lack of forage and bedding, caused by last years rainfall affecting harvests, would have to be taken into account. So very, very sad for all concerned.
 
Our early lambs and ewes are strawed down on a hard track at moment like a open tunnel so that they are safe, not let any march lambs out for a week so they are like sardines with sheep lambing everyday, although we are now on tail enders but fields so wet that doesn't help either.
 
Dolcé;11656991 said:
I think a huge part of the problem was the strong easterly wind causing massive drifts, the sheep shelter by hedges/walls etc and sadly they have been buried in the drifts. I understand that there are also a lot of cattle in the same predicament. The main problem is that if they are not dug out then any that survive being buried in the drifts (and they do survive it quite often) will drown when it thaws. I feel so sorry for the farmers affected and hope that local communities are rallying round to help them dig out where possible. Sheep are hardy and should be able to live out without a problem, for those farmers that do have barn space I would imagine that the lack of forage and bedding, caused by last years rainfall affecting harvests, would have to be taken into account. So very, very sad for all concerned.
Click to expand...

Exactly as you have said. I live in Cumbria in an less favorable area, this is the land that farmers have, the sheep are indidgenous to the area. This is their income so they are not going to willfully neglect their sheep and go to the pub instead!! Got to love armchair farmers.
 
Trying not to get cross at some of the comments on here about the nasty farmers deliberately not bringing their sheep in or taking notice of weather forecasts.

There are some bad farmers around but 99% of them if they had a shed to put them in and (perhaps more importantly and no one has mentioned it) someone flew in a massive supply of forage bedding and sheep nuts to FEED the sheep on while they were in, and they had some way of getting to the sheep to bring them in, then believe me that is what they would do.

Many sheep farms have thousands of sheep away off in remote locations. It is simply not possible to provide buildings for all of them, nor would it be necessary in 49 out of 50 years. Not possible physically and especially not possible economically. You ask your local supermarket what price per kilo they are paying for their lamb this year, and then look at the shelf price. In most cases it is 3 or 4 times the amount, the wholesale prices farmers are getting has resulted in them making no profit at all only losses this year, while the supermarkets rake in profits and customers rightly turn away from lamb as it is so expensive.

Those that have buildings have them for lambing and often one ewe will lamb and stay in for a day and make space for another, they aren't always in at the same time.

Lambing outdoors is (except in years like this) MUCH healthier for sheep, who are designed to live outdoors. There are many diseases which are much more of a problem for indoor lambing flocks and for which those flocks have to be given preventative drugs or treatment if and when they strike. From a welfare POV, in 49 out of 50 years, sheep are much BETTER off being outside, and you can't run a farm on the basis of one year in 5o and freak weather, nor should you be blamed for not doing so. If you had to, there would be NO sheep farming in the uk s it would simply be uneconomic. Instead it would all be imported from new Zealand, where sheep farming is all outdoors and more like ranching. There, if a sheep has trouble lambing, it and the lamb dies. The losses are accepted due to the sheer numbers 30k on one farm, and terrain means you couldn't do the kind of lambing care we expect from a welfare perspective in UK. Even there some years no profit is made. Demanding more sheds and bedding and feed in uk would just result in lower welfare from importing from systems elsewhere, you can't ignore that and just concentrate on demanding pet care standards.

Lastly, farmers decide when to lamb based on economics ( to finish a lamb the same year which is the only economic way to do it, you need to lamb in the winter not the spring). - late march lambing is late for commercial flocks and normally would mean decent weather and grass growing. Long range weather forecasts are complete ly unreliable this far out.

So easy to pass judgement as some have done on this thread. Get a bus up and a shovel out and help dig out some sheep if you really care about welfare instead of passing easy trite judgements on farmers who may well lose everything. The suicide rate for farmers is one of the highest in the country. Support them or have low welfare imports instead, up to you.
 
I live in hill country and am currently awaiting a snowblower so that I can get out. We have banks up to eight feet high.

But there isn't that much snow. It was the wind that caused the problems, the fields are 95% clear of snow. The sheep sheltered from the wind under the walls, and the drifts fall exactly where they shelter, and for the same reason, the wind drops in the lee of a wall.

I do agree, though, that some farmers featured on the news the other night in the Isle of Man had been rather negligent in knowing that snow was forecast and failing to ensure that they had enough feed on site before it started. But the vast majority of farmers are NOT neglecting their sheep. It was tabloid journalism at its best.
 
mon said:
And if we routinely long term housed them be accused of intensify farming them.
Click to expand...

Exactly, and those who lamb "in", assuming that they have the space, face a totally different set of problems from those who lamb "out".

My heart goes out to those who are digging out ewes which are barely alive. It must be the most soul destroying of jobs.

Once in a while, when we lamb "out", we'll be caught out, and be lambing in torrential rain or blizzards, and when that happens, then we have high losses. That's the way that it is. It isn't just the financial loss, it's the depressing waste, and the fact that animals are suffering. No one enjoys it.

We cannot predict the weather, with any degree of accuracy, and we are all victims, on occasion.

Alec.
 
"I do agree, though, that some farmers featured on the news the other night in the Isle of Man had been rather negligent in knowing that snow was forecast and failing to ensure that they had enough feed on site before it started. But the vast majority of farmers are NOT neglecting their sheep. It was tabloid journalism at its best. "

Even though snow was forecast I doubt anyone anticipated how much would actually fall, this is an extreme event. It is easy to say that farmers should have had enough feed on site but in most cases this would have to bought in, nuts @ £250/t (1 tonne would not go very far) Silage @ £20 bale & straw £??, it is march and many farms will have used up most of their feed/straw meaning there will be little around to buy anyway. Farmers, especially in the areas affected will be on the lowest incomes and to find this extra money would be incredidbly hard. Even those who had bought in feed would still have to get it out to the animals and looking at the drifts i'm not sure you could move feed easily.
My heart goes out to everyone affected, it is very easy to sit in your warm house and criticise but as they say 'walk a mile in another mans shoes' or wellies in this instance.
 
amymay said:
Thanks for everyone's responses.

I must live in cloud cuckoo land.
Click to expand...

Of course you don't live in cuckoo land :) I can easily understand your thought process there. It's only when you consider the practicalities in more detail, does it become pretty clear why all this has happened. And how else could you consider those practicalities if not just asking questions?
We have had pretty rough few years now with all this sheep farming malarkey, the weather is against us, the market is against us and we go from bad to worse in a steady progress, I suppose tempers are running a bit short, too, I know mine does.
 
For once, Amymay, I was disappointed in your original quite accusatory question because there have been such commonsense answers to it from the likes of Justabob, LLM, Dolce` and more. My heart bleeds for those farmers in this situation especially as a farmer less than a mile from here found himself in the same situation with ewes snowed in and had to be dug out; we had 8 inches of snow, he had 4 foot; that is how random the wind has factored in this - and it's snowing again, deep joy!
TBF, I think I'm probably wrong (and in cloud cuckoo land!) in assuming that horse people would automatically appreciate the hardships the farmers are going through with this given the horrible winter most of us have gone through with conditions that we couldn't change even if we had wanted or been able to afford to.
 
It's pretty random weather, a village about 20 miles away from me has been on the news, JCBs digging cars out, people digging their stock out - I have no snow at all, but it's wet and bitterly cold and I've lost few lambs to that :o Add to that a dead calf this morning and I am best not approached without caution :(
 
Maesfen said:
For once, Amymay, I was disappointed in your original quite accusatory question because there have been such commonsense answers to it from the likes of Justabob, LLM, Dolce` and more. My heart bleeds for those farmers in this situation especially as a farmer less than a mile from here found himself in the same situation with ewes snowed in and had to be dug out; we had 8 inches of snow, he had 4 foot; that is how random the wind has factored in this - and it's snowing again, deep joy!
TBF, I think I'm probably wrong (and in cloud cuckoo land!) in assuming that horse people would automatically appreciate the hardships the farmers are going through with this given the horrible winter most of us have gone through with conditions that we couldn't change even if we had wanted or been able to afford to.
Click to expand...

I was surprised at some of the comments made against farmers (not just on here) because I believed this too. Just as an aside, the road where our main herd are kept has been closed for days, as have the roads around it, purely because of drifting snow. We have drifts several feet deep in parts of the field and nothing in other parts, where the wind has literally blown the snow off into the drifts. I am only too aware that it could have been my ponies buried under drifts along the hedge line and consider myself very fortunate that they are all safe and well. We have had a hell of a job getting haylage and water to them, even with a large 4x4 tractor but it has had to be done. Had I lived in an area where farmers are having to dig out sheep then I would have been there offering help and I really hope they are getting the help they need so desperately from communities that are able to get to them.
 
I'm not a farmer and never have been but I felt desperately sorry for the farmers I saw on the television digging out their stock.

The snow drifts are the like of which I've never seen before and I was thanking god I don't have to work outside or on the land for a living.

It must be a terribly thankless task being a farmer, they are battling on all sides, rubbish supermarket buying costs, huge fodder / feed costs and no let up in sight of any cloud on the horizon.

Hats of to them.
 
There are many reasons why this isn't possible.

Firstly, to assume all farmers have enough internal space for livestock is flawed. Our native breeds are bred to live outside, they are not used to being inside and would not like being inside which could lead to them not eating and also, disease is a big problem in housed livestock. They are much healthier outside. Sheep by design, are the animals used to graze and therefore maintain our hills and mountains. These sheep are not high profit animals, margins are tight, having to build sheds to house them "just in case" would be impossible financially.

Secondly, if you lamb and calve outside, like I do, I only have a small shed in which I bring in any problem animals. The vast majority never see the inside of a shed.

People who lamb inside will not have the capacity to keep animals with lambs at foot inside for very long either. You can cram pregnant animals in a smaller space in an emergency (disease and feed issues notwithstanding) but once they have lambs, keeping them too tight would be a disaster.

Farmers have to produce food at the lowest price possible. To build sheds to house the national flock would be impossible financially and since free range IS best, the sheds would be empty for 50 years between seriously bad winters where these issues occur, and no doubt fall down when that amount of snow fell on them anyway.

This years problems are due to the unseasonable amount of snow which has fallen.

Lambing outside is better for the ewe, it is better for the lamb and it is better for the UK housewife who buys British lamb.
 
cptrayes said:
I do agree, though, that some farmers featured on the news the other night in the Isle of Man had been rather negligent in knowing that snow was forecast and failing to ensure that they had enough feed on site before it started. But the vast majority of farmers are NOT neglecting their sheep. It was tabloid journalism at its best.
Click to expand...

jrp204 said:
Even though snow was forecast I doubt anyone anticipated how much would actually fall, this is an extreme event. It is easy to say that farmers should have had enough feed on site but in most cases this would have to bought in, nuts @ £250/t (1 tonne would not go very far) Silage @ £20 bale & straw £??, it is march and many farms will have used up most of their feed/straw meaning there will be little around to buy anyway. Farmers, especially in the areas affected will be on the lowest incomes and to find this extra money would be incredidbly hard.
Click to expand...

I understand your point, but I am in hill sheep farming country with tiny farms, right on the bottom margins of farm income and all the farmers around here make provision for this kind of weather and still have fodder available. I have lived here 22 years and the latest that we have had to dig ourselves out is April 4th, but everyone still remembers a year when they dug out lambs in June. They allow for it and would not go into April short of food, never mind March.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top