Nearly 200 years ago the poet William Wordsworth, in a letter written at his cottage here to a political leader in London, observed that he wrote poetry “to show that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.”
He was referring to the farmers of the Lake District all around him. Today their descendants are indeed feeling deeply. The emotions run from grief to depression to blazing anger as farmers watch herds they have nurtured for years disappear before their eyes–or wait for the death knell–as foot-and-mouth disease ravages the nation.
More Top Picks Honeywell Wifi Smart Color
“It’s like a bereavement,” said Les Armstrong, 55, who has lost 500 head of cattle and 1,300 sheep on his farm near Kirkoswald, a village outside the Lake District but within the county of Cumbria that embraces the district. “It just stuns you really. You go into mourning. But then you get over it.”
Not everyone does. Peter Allen, the National Farmers Union representative for upland farmers throughout Cumbria, gets calls from distraught colleagues every day, his phone ringing almost continuously from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
“Hearing fully grown men crying down the phone is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to face in my life,” Allen said. “I’ve broken down myself after I put the phone down, but you can’t do that when they are talking to you and looking to you for support.”
Laurence Harwood, chairman of the Cumbrian branch of the Country Land and Business Association of Britain, said: “There is absolute misery going through the farming community. Some people are pretty near to suicide.”
Ground zero of epidemic
Cumbria is one of Britain’s focal points for the foot-and-mouth epidemic. But the Lake District, a huge national park, was free of the disease until Monday, when sheep on the Black Hall Farm west of Coniston were found to be infected. They were quickly slaughtered, and Lake District people are holding their breath, hoping the disease will not spread, because a mass slaughter could profoundly affect the ecology of the entire region.
Most of the Cumbrian cases are in the area around Penrith, where Armstrong farms with his brother and his son. All of their herds are gone, wiped out two weeks ago, and two weeks before that his daughter and her husband lost 200 head of cattle and 700 sheep.
“Our problems seem minor compared with what is happening in the rest of Cumbria,” said Armstrong, who is the National Farmers Union national livestock chairman. “Every farm in Cumbria is in grief now, not just me. We had BSE [mad cow disease] before this, so we have just had five years of hell. We thought BSE was a crisis, but it was nothing compared with this.”
Like most farmers, he thinks the government awoke to the crisis too late. To control the outbreak, Armstrong said, infected animals should have been killed within 24 to 36 hours. In fact, some herds have not been slaughtered for four or even six days afterward, and when slaughter takes place thousands of decomposing carcasses often have been left lying on farms for several days.
Detectives seek origins
Meantime, a team of British detectives who dug through garbage dumps and tracked thousands of livestock shipments has concluded that the source of the outbreak may have been an illegal shipment of tainted meat, possibly from East Asia.
Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown told Parliament on Tuesday that some of the infected meat may have ended up in garbage that was later fed to pigs in northern England. From the pigs, the highly contagious virus passed to seven nearby sheep.
The government announced a ban on swill and said it would seek the European Union’s permission to vaccinate livestock, though Brown said there was no decision yet on whether to begin a vaccination campaign.
The epidemic has brought into the open a large gulf between British urban dwellers and farmers. Many in the cities complain that the farmers long have been pampered with European subsidies and even now are being compensated for their losses while others who have suffered from the crisis, such as hotel and restaurant owners, are not. Many urban people also say farmers got what was coming to them because of factory farming practices that are cruel to animals and created conditions for disease outbreaks.
The farmers, naturally, see it differently.
Armstrong said the compensation for his lost herds would go into the bank until he can restock. Other farmers are not so lucky. Their incomes have been reduced to zero, and they will have to use the compensation money to live. They will not be allowed to restock herds for six months, to make sure the epidemic has passed.
Farmers also are not allowed to move sheep that are in their fields. So, because of extreme late-winter cold and rain, many lambs have been born in dreadful weather conditions and die of hypothermia within minutes. Two years from now, the ewes among them would have been impregnated. But with their deaths the flock will be diminished even on farms that escape infection.
With fox hunting banned during the epidemic, foxes are also left to prey on newborn lambs. One farmer said his neighbor lost 11 lambs last weekend to foxes.
Farmers also worry about herds of roe deer that roam wild in the Lake District and can carry foot-and-mouth disease. They say the government should be culling the deer.
Because of restrictions on visits to farms, all of the farmers interviewed for this article had to be contacted by telephone, or met in towns outside their farms.
Allen, 50, the National Farmers Union representative, said that every time he leaves his farm and returns home, he stops at the farm gate, strips down to his shorts and puts all his clothes in a plastic bag before driving up to his house. Then he immediately takes a bath, and his clothes are washed, just in case he might be carrying the virus.
Lucky–so far
Allen farms 2,000 acres on the edge of the Lake District at Brampton, and he has 60 beef cows and 1,400 sheep. At the moment, he’s among the relatively lucky ones. His farm is infection-free, but he has lost 100 sheep that he sent to a farm in southern Scotland for the winter to be fattened. They had to be slaughtered because of an outbreak there. He said a neighbor who also sent sheep away for the winter lost 2,000, almost half his flock.
“To lose even 100 sheep is–I don’t know how you describe it,” he said, on the verge of tears through most of an hourlong interview in a Windermere cafe.
“Getting up at this time of year used to be a pleasure on a spring morning. You were seeing the newborn lambs, seeing the newborn calves and hearing the birds singing. At the present time, you hear nothing. Now I get up in the mornings, looking more diligently to see that I haven’t got any signs of what might be around the corner.”
More Top Picks Best Pillows For Your Neck While Sleeping
Farm product prices have fallen in Britain in recent years, and Allen said the average hill farmer last year earned less than $9,000. “With a disaster on this scale, it will take a tremendous amount of support and understanding from the government to get people even to consider going back into this business,” he said. “I’m in it because hill farming is in my blood. The government can’t afford to have people like me walk away.”
Susan Aglionby, 56, who has a 50-acre farm at Houghton near Carlisle, learned Monday that foot-and-mouth disease had infected her livestock–nine head of cattle and 140 sheep, including 88 lambs. While other farmers have had to wait days to have herds destroyed, she pushed for immediate action and all the animals were destroyed by midnight that day.
“My animals were sick and I knew they had to go for their own sake,” she said. “I feel I’ve lost a number of friends. It’s a disaster, but I will start again.”
Aglionby practices organic farming, not allowing any chemicals on her farm, and thinks once this crisis is past “farming will be different” in Britain.
Unique breed at risk
While most farmers in the Lake District have so far escaped foot-and-mouth disease on their premises, many have nonetheless lost animals. That is because they send sheep to farms in the Penrith area for the winter to be fattened up.
“We have lost 144 lambs,” said Judy Thompson, who has a farm at Grasmere with her husband, David. She said farmers in Grasmere and nearby Langdale have lost about 3,000 sheep in the same way.
The great worry in the Lake District is that the case of infection found Monday near Coniston will spread. The sheep that live on the hills belong to a rare breed, called Herdwick and are believed to have come from Norway in the Middle Ages. There are no fences or walls to separate flocks, but Herdwick sheep have an almost unique ability–apparently passed on by ewes to their lambs–to understand the perimeters of their territory so they do not stray or mix with other flocks. They also know where to go for shelter in bad weather, and are extremely hardy.
Farmers fear that all this will be lost if the Herdwick sheep have to be destroyed en masse. “What worries me is that we would then lose the centuries of behavior patterns that make possible the appearance of these mountains which is so important to tourists,” said Laurence Harwood, the chairman of the Country Land and Business Association.