I come from a family that had been in farming for at least 300 years. Never had any trouble with disease until last century, with the increased amount of movement between farms, the increasing amount of senseless rules and regulations laid on us by the EEC/EU (note how the word 'Economic' has fallen out....)and the sky rocketing price of commercial feed. To get enough money to make farming viable, the land used for hay and slurry (a feed made with rotting grass, don't go eugh, you eat cheese don't you? That's just rotting milk) to provide winter feed, had to be turned over to cattle, who then ate all the grass that could have been the winter feed... so you have to buy in commercial feed, which, because the land is all being used to keep cattle, because meadows are not commercially viable, has to be made with whatever waste products are available to try to keep the costs down and to afford that you have to keep more cattle..... see the circle forming?

When farmers worked small scale farms and could slaughter their own animals, the price of meat was relatively cheap. My grandfather always kept a pig for that very reason, even though he was dairy farmer. As soon as slaughter houses were introduced, the price increased, because someone had to be employed to drive the animals to the slaughterhouse (and that's drive as in walk them there, so slaughterhouses had to be nearby or else you walked all the fat off them), the slaughterhouse had to be paid for doing a job the farmer had done up till then. Then there was the cost of transporting the meat back to the shops.

Once the EEC started bringing in milk quotas the situation became ludicrous, with prosperous, self supporting farms supplying a local area at a reasonable price suddenly becoming too small to be financially viable, the cattle are sold off (for stupidly low prices) or slaughtered (at a cost to the farmer) and the price of milk goes up in that area. As soon as you start putting lots of milk from 3 counties together and selling it over 5 counties, you enlarge the risk of spreading disease. 1 tuburcular cow can now infect half the country without ever leaving it's field. Mass farming means the farmer cannot always see which animal is sickening and it goes unnoticed. The government declares the slaughter of all animals in that area, infected or not, and the price of milk goes up again. Compensation does not always cover the market value and is never enough to buy in the same amount of healthy stock, so more land is turned over to keeping more cattle to raise money to pay off the mortgage on the animals..... See the circle again?

When a farmer was a farmer, qualifications were not essential. Now that the farmer has to be an accountant and an economist, the qualifications required are a bloody sight different!

(Incidentally, the man who owns the most farms and land in the south west has probably never spent more than a day in a milking parlour in his whole 40 odd years.... He may be Duke of Cornwall, but he has no idea how it works....)

LTS