I was a young boy when BSE (e.g. Mad Cow disease) was a thing in the UK. From what Wikipedia wrote more than four million heads of cattle were slaughtered. The disease took hold of British herds in the early 1980s and is still present today. The Ministry of Agriculture knew about the outbreak, its scientists were concerned but at the time no one knew about prions. For several years the government took no action despite its own scientists saying that this was a serious problem (it came out in a later investigation). Until very recently, if you tried to give blood outside the UK and admitted to live in the UK between 1979 and 1990 you would be rejected as a blood donor because of BSE.
When the government reacted it overreacted. First, destroying the herds that were affected was necessary but the trouble lasted for decades. Until 2006, UK farmers were forbidden from exporting meat on the bone to Europe (there is also BSE in Europe...). It took a very long time for herds to recover for many farmers faced bankruptcy following the outbreak. British cattle farmers had few friends in the late 1980s. To this day a good portion of the meat being sold in UK supermarkets actually originates on the continent. We profited greatly from the 2020 dislocation when imports fell by 10%, it's all it took, but in reality, our real market was hotels and restaurants that prefer meat from the UK rather than from the continent -- housewives when they do the weekly shopping, don't particularly care where their beef and pork was raised.
It's an old story that we have been dealing with since the foundation of our herds -- controlling illnesses is hard because nobody knows where the problems arise. The best-known cattle disease is foot and mouth (FMD). How does cattle go from having no FMD to a herd being in trouble, it is a very infectious viral disease that is easily transmissible to humans. Herds have to be culled aggressively. Our herds are small, and cows generally prefer to "live" in smaller herds of less than 100 individuals, so it's easier to control the spread of the disease (we have never had it in our herd), but newly purchased cows are segregated from established groups.
How does the MAFF deal with cattle diseases? In my opinion not very well. After the debacle that was BSE, the government centralized everything. So if there was a sudden problem in Welsh herds it became a problem in Norfolk herds. It's like worrying about forest fires in California when you live in New York! There is no connection between herds in Wales and in Norfolk, cattle almost never move such long distances, the only reason would be for breeding, and there are many specific safeguards for that. Moreover, while genetic diversity is important in a herd we don't have to go that far to reduce inbreeding risks. Yet the MAFF treats the entire farming community as one single entity and the problems in Cumbria are not the same as in Kent.
We find ourselves in a difficult position because the things we worry about are often not the same as what worries the MAFF. The church steps are where you first hear of herd problems, our vet is always well aware of the local problems and the high breed diversity in our region (breeds are affected differently), and also the rules and regulations regarding our bio status. It is one of the main reasons we built our own slaughterhouse, reducing the risk of meat contamination (BTW our meat contaminates the commercial slaughterhouses because we give only about 10% of the antibiotics that other farmers). Again it is a choice that we made and are very well compensated for the additional risk. Every side of beef is tested, is numbered and all the cuts are cross-referenced until they leave our operation. From the bar code on a meat packet, we can trace from which animal it was produced. If there is a problem the entirety of the animal's carcass can be identified, thankfully in five years of operation we have not had any significant problems.
Since its inception, our operations have been paperless. Since we were building completely new operations when we started the farm (the land was leased to various local farmers for pasture), implementing paperless operations was easy. It is therefore almost impossible to say how much paperwork we produce for the MAFF because a large percentage of the information we produce generates automatic reports that are unseen by anyone on the farm. We have an audit trail from bottom to top, which means initial data drives everything. As an example: when we harvest our corn for silage the combine's onboard computer automatically registers the field where the corn was produced, what was our production rate per acre, and how we used the corn. Our system would have cross-referenced the type of corn we had planted the temperature of the region and the local rainfall, the amount of fertilizer, and what type of fertilizer we had used on the field. All this data was generated automatically, with no human input. This generates a farm-wide report that is sent to the MAFF annually, as far as we are concerned not a single human has looked at the data, unless there are inconsistencies -- which rarely occurs. All this data, at there are pages and pages of Excel datasheets produced are sent in prescribed report format to the MAFF.
The same for our cattle, each animal is identified in which herd it lived what tests were performed what type of medical care was provided during its lifetime. For milk cows, we have "pills" that are implanted in the rumen that measure daily data such as temperature: It alarms the farm when the animal's temperature rises (when it's in heat) when the animal is distressed (too cold or too hot) or again when it is unwell. All that data for each cow is produced and is eventually included in various reports to the MAFF. our team set up the system to track each animal in real-time throughout its life cycle. All that data goes one way only. Very little useful data makes it back to us. Again we get health advisory because of some FDM outbreak in Wales, but that has nothing to do with us.
Note: In the past, it was common for farmers to hide illness for their herds and just call the knacker, but this is no longer the farmer's reality. Farm insurance makes it profitable for farmers to declare herd illnesses since they can obtain compensation,
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