Ben Maguire: North Cornwall farmers face ‘brutal combination’

Farmers across North Cornwall are being squeezed from two directions at once this summer, and the area’s MP has asked the government to step in before the pressure gets any worse. Ben Maguire, the Member of Parliament for North Cornwall, has written to Defra warning that relentless heat and a severe outbreak of bluetongue disease are landing on the livestock and dairy sector at the same time.

In a letter dated 3 August to Stephen Morgan MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Ben set out his “extreme concerns for the livestock and dairy sector in North Cornwall”. Days later, in a public post on Facebook, he described farmers facing “a brutal combination this summer”.

Grass burning off before winter has even started

The first problem is water, or the lack of it. Weeks of high temperatures with next to no meaningful rainfall have scorched grazing land at exactly the point when farmers should be building up feed for the colder months.

Ben told the minister that “the prolonged and sustained high temperatures are severely impacting the levels of forage that farmers can conserve for the winter months”. With the grass burning off through the lack of any meaningful rainfall, he said, many are already dipping into limited winter supplies far earlier than they would want to.

His warning is that the damage will outlast the weather. The stresses and strains building up now, he told the minister, will have implications for the health and welfare of both farmers and their animals long after the current drought has broken. A dry summer that eats into winter feed is a problem that follows a farm right through to the following spring.

Bluetongue hitting many farmers ‘for the first time’

On top of the drought has come bluetongue, a midge-borne virus that has spread through livestock this summer. In his letter, Ben said the outbreak “has far exceeded the prevalence of the disease in previous years and is being experienced by many farmers for the first time”, and that its arrival in North Cornwall had been very sudden.

Bluetongue is carried by biting midges and can cause lethargy, lameness, birth defects and miscarriage in sheep and cattle. It can be fatal to affected animals, though it carries no risk to human health or to food safety. Ben described it as “an insidious and indiscriminate illness” that comes in multiple strains and can present with varied, little or no symptoms, which he said makes it hard for keepers to know how badly their herds are affected.

That uncertainty feeds into the vaccination question. Case numbers are being tracked at a national level, and vaccine supply has been reported as under pressure because of high demand. Ben noted that availability had not always been consistent in previous years, leaving keepers with a difficult call over whether to vaccinate at all.

The human cost is what he kept returning to. Some farmers, he wrote, “are losing livestock daily with the associated cost of disposal to add to the loss of value of the animal”, something “both financially and mentally extremely tough on farming families” already working to tight margins. In his Facebook post he put it more bluntly, warning that “the mental health crisis that our farmers face is mounting”.

What he is asking Defra to do

Ben has put two specific requests to the department. He wants Defra to consider “subsidising the costs of disposing of fallen stock in areas where Bluetongue has been identified as being particularly severe”, taking at least part of the bill off farms that are losing animals.

He has also called for a drought version of the Farming Recovery Fund, the support scheme that already exists for flooding events. A similar approach for droughts would be appropriate, he argued, particularly where the welfare of livestock could end up compromised as a result. In short, he wants some of the overall farming budget pointed at the sector while it is under this much strain.

On Facebook, Ben said he had “urgently written to DEFRA” to press for both measures. Whether the department picks up either idea is now a question for Stephen Morgan and his colleagues at Marsham Street.