[Closed] Foot and Mouth Disease: 20 years ago.

I remade discussing it in some forum that had just started and was launching a magazine, I wondered what happened of them?

It does feel a bit odd looking back at this...20 years ago seems a long time but at the same time isn't feeling long enough. This had a huge impact all over for outdoor life but a devastating impact on the farmers and many others directly involved.
The aftermath of all this was a serious uphill struggle for the farmers (some 'recovered', others didn't), we then got the 7Stanes (aware it wasn't just due to this but the need to get local economies improving helped this move along) to try and help drive more people to rural areas to help local economies.
I suspect to a lot of people it isn't much of a memory and they don't spend much time thinking about it, particularly now, but I do often think of that period and think how it all went - unsure why I do as I've no link to farming, but it did have a serious impact on outdoor access, so I was affected on the fringes and purely from a selfish reason.
I felt very sorry and sad for the farmers losing their livelihoods, such a sad state.

Red sky at night.

The sheep are alight.

Red sky in the morning.

The sheep are still burning.

Two good things to come out of it were (a) the 7 Stanes MTB centres and (b) a complete revision of the then proposed Land Reform (Scotland) Act. OTOH, I got "sacked" by the Pentland Hills Regional Park Ranger Service as I called out their lies regarding access restrictions and that was picked up by BBC Scotland.

I remember all the hotels in the Aviemore and Fort William areas having half price deals on and being up there snowboarding every other weekend, instead of once every 6 weeks or so. Finish work on Friday, 6hr drive up then getting home around 10pm on Sunday after 2 days on the slopes, up at 5am n back to graft nxt morning

I used to, and still live not far from the farm at Heddon where it started. I also used to have to drive past the pyres on my way to and from work. It was not a nice sight, and if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction it was not a nice smell.

I seem to remember there was a few jokes about it being like a massive BBQ. It really wasn't, unless your BBQ included all the organs, hides and bones.

My road bike must be twenty years old too

I was a student in Aberdeen at the time and I still remember checking ceefax every evening to see the updated list of affected farms.
Dad had an agricultural engineering business in Lockerbie at the time and it was pretty tough seeing the names of farms I'd worked with him on inexorably coming up one by one. For a number of reasons his business never really recovered and he retired a couple of years later. It finished a lot of smaller family farms that were already hurting because of the BSE crisis.

At times Covid feels like F&M for humans

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I'd just started working in the mobile telecom sector, and I Was tasked with following Vodafone engineers and contractors around and spraying them and there vehicles with chemicals as they couldn't access farms without us.

I was doing a PhD studying Pennine hay meadows, ruined that years fieldwork. I remember riding up Hartside Pass and seeing dozens of fires burning, the smell was awful in Penrith.

A guy I went to college with and raced enduro motorbikes with farmed on the Eppynt firing ranges near Llanwyrtyd Wells, he leased hundreds of acres from the MOD for sheep grazing. The land was used for massive burning pits, we were up there watching the world rally stage just afterwards, not a pretty sight, the pits seemed to go on for miles.

No burning piles of the dead either.

There is - there is plenty of dead being burnt we just don't see them.  We don't really have much of a visual reference for covid as human dead don't tend to get bulldozed into to heaps - we just see a number and the bigger it gets the less it seems to mean. But if it helps to picture the scale we - if we laid coffins of the dead from the past 12 months end to end they'd stretch all the way round the M25

L.A. suspends air quality rules to clear cremation backlog

How has 20 years passed?

I too remember the smell of burning animals.

(I also remember a West coast Scottish estate desperate/happy for us to head up from city centre Sheffield. We spent a glorious weather 7 days canoeing in from Glenelg to Barrisdale and climbed every peak in Knoydart.)

A guy I went to college with and raced enduro motorbikes with farmed on the Eppynt firing ranges near Llanwyrtyd Wells, he leased hundreds of acres from the MOD for sheep grazing. The land was used for massive burning pits, we were up there watching the world rally stage just afterwards, not a pretty sight, the pits seemed to go on for miles.

I saw those when watching the rally too. Those pits were set up after the pits around my home town (Crickhowell) were quickly not able to cope, the stench of the dead animals being moved one evening took days to clear after they made the decision to move when the amount of animals arriving was way above the level they could dispose of.

Dad had an agricultural engineering business in Lockerbie at the time and it was pretty tough seeing the names of farms I’d worked with him on inexorably coming up one by one.

We had a few weekss of that round me, the dread of who's farm was next was horrific. I think only 1 farm in the whole area managed to escape it, they felt so guilty to the other farmers as it was pure luck they kept their herds. Strangely it was a blessing that the farms were all infected quickly and dealt with fast, it all seemed inevitable and prolonging it would have been even more cruel.

We'd just relocated from Crawley to Derby, partly to be nearer the Peak District, and when we got here it was shut!

I remember it too well. My first year at uni, and coming back home to the small farming village I grew up in in Cumbria was hard, a lot of old family friends were right on the verge of collapse. My Dad was in Trading Standards, and Animal Health were part of their office, so everyone got co-opted into serving cull notices to farms. It's the only time my Dad's ever spent a month with a police escort everywhere he went for work.

The pyres as we came off the motorway at Penrith, the lorries headed down to Great Orton and the burial sites - now a nature reserve at Watchtree, so that's another small positive. Half my family's from the north east, so we used to drive past the farm where it all spread from regularly.

A friend a couple of years older than me did Vet studies at Glasgow uni, and they were told the year before the outbreak that it was probably going to be taken off the syllabus, they were probably the last year who'd be taught about it.

I was working on a dairy farm when we got it. Rough times. We restocked with a suckler herd a year later.

I was working here at the time. Ironically accounts in a large engineering company.

At lunch we played on the full size snooker table in the snooker room.

The other memory of the time was the twin towers being hit by aircraft. Did foot & mouth go in to September?

For a while we couldn’t go in to work as the home had a working farm attached.

Me and Mrs wf returned from Germany in autumn 2000 to help my dad on the farm with a view to slowly taking over more and more responsibility for running it. We bought with us 2 cattle in a trailer that had been given to us by the farmers we worked for in the last year we lived in Germany. It was the worst autumn on record and it rained solid from the September we arrived until almost christmas. It meant the ewes and cattle went into winter in a pretty poor state and consequently calving and lambing were not going to go well. We will never forget the day, it was good Friday, when an Irish vet appeared and told us a neighbour had a suspected outbreak (turned out to be negative!) and that we would be taken out as a contiguous farm on Easter Sunday. We had 20 lambs already on the bottle by that time and the Saturday evening we had a very difficult calving. And all the time knowing that all the pet lambs and the cow and calf would be shot the next morning anyway.They couldn't burn on our ground as the electric pylons cut across the only flat areas so they shot all the cattle and calves sheep and loaded them into big trailers with spikes to cart them next door to the pyres. And the cull was only the start. The clean up went on for another 4 months or more. There was a constant flow of people trying to make a quick buck out of the disaster while we kind of muddles through it in a daze, part shell-shocked, part pragmatic. My partner (now wife) isn't born into farming and the whole thing almost broke her. She suffered depression before, but things have only really ever gotten worse since. I don't think she will ever get over it deep down. We had both given up smoking a couple of years before but both started again the day the vet came. It was and remains the worst period in my life and I would not wish my worst enemy to have to go through it. Such a waste. 😥

Tough times - I wasn’t into bikes at the time but was a keen walker and climber so found my life seriously curtailed, but obvs a minimal impact compared to you WF. I remember night after night driving home along the M62 and seeing the orange pyres in the distance - very sad...

My first job out of Uni was with a consultancy tasked with re-visiting all of the C&D pits to check for ground contamination. (There were pits for the pyre remains another company dealt with and then the contamination & Disinfectant pits that dealt with all the material that might have been in contact with the herds like animal feed / hay.) Noting many farms in the UK have their own water supplies and of the people managing the pits, many had been drafted in, many with no experience at all in this area. Still remember rattling through cold-call phone calls with farmers to check if they could recall / confirm what we had recorded. Got quite a lot of hate / angry - are you DEFRA, are you working for DEFRA. Then had one perfectly polite family but seemed guarded. Understandably I thought didn't really want to re-live it, did they HAVE to go through this, can they be taken off the record etc. Turns out their son committed suicide and this was only 2 years later, here we were bringing it all back up again. What do you say? Suicide rates went up ten-fold in the farming community, where it was already one of the biggest killers. Absolutely awful time for many and very significant long-term impacts on whole communities.