UNITED KINGDOM- THE SELF INFLICTED SHEARING CRISIS.
Sheep prices are running at record levels but this important sector of the farming industry is facing a major crisis as a result of the UK government’s new rules on migrant workers.
Normally about 500 professional shearers from Australia and New Zealand come to the UK in late spring to help shear the national flock of almost 15 million adult sheep.
However, new legislation dictates that each worker from outside the EU must
be in possession of a biometric identity card costing £200.
The almost certain shortage of shearers has the potential to cause huge welfare problems, among them fly strike.
This happens when flies lay their eggs in the fleece; maggots emerge that eat into the flesh of sheep. This problem can be acute during the summer months and frequently results in a slow and painful death if not immediately treated.
Fly strike is seldom a problem once sheep have been shorn.
There simply not enough professional shearers in the UK and farmers have increasingly come to rely on gangs from the other side of the world to remove the wool from at least a quarter of the national flock.
Shearers in both New Zealand and Australia claim that the new rules and the cost of the card make it barely worth making the trip to the UK. Only one shearer from Australia is so far a definite arrival, but in addition to paying the £200 charge he had to travel 200 miles to Canberra to be fingerprinted and photographed. He was then subject to an interview that lasted barely three minutes.
It can take eight weeks to process an identity card, meaning it will now be too late for many workers, since the shearing season usually starts in May.
Frank Langrish, who runs several thousand sheep in Sussex and is also chairman of the British Wool Marketing Board, said:
"The UK sheep sector relies on the shearing being undertaken by these very skilled gangs from the southern hemisphere. At a conservative estimate they shear around five million sheep in the UK. If they don’t arrive here in the next few weeks there will be serious difficulties."
Those views are shared by Rob Morris, a shearing contractor based in the south of England who shears about 35,000 sheep each summer with the help of gangs from New Zealand.
He said: "This is bureaucracy taken to the extreme and will mean millions of sheep will suffer this summer. We just do not have the skilled labour in sufficient numbers in the UK to get all our sheep sheared. The southern hemisphere gangs are among the world’s best and fastest shearers with some individuals able to take the wool off around 400 sheep each day.
"A lot of these people would normally come to the UK straight from contract shearing work in the US and Italy, but now the government says they must first return home to the southern hemisphere to undertake the biometric card formalities. We are urging all farmers to put pressure on their MPs so that we can avoid a major livestock catastrophe this summer."
