Defras arbitrary lines bring chaos to sheep farmers

When Frank Langrish, a big farmer on Romney Marsh and chairman of the Wool Marketing Board, last week met scores of his fellow farmers at Ashford market in Kent, they had only one topic of conversation. This was what Mr Langrish calls the "unmitigated chaos" the Government has inflicted on their industry by its response to two animal diseases that lately infected a handful of farms in southern and eastern England. First came the foot and mouth virus, which escaped from the Government's own laboratory site at Pirbright, and then the bluetongue virus, arriving from the Continent

The timing of these two disasters was impeccable, at just the time of year when sheep farmers, in particular, would normally be moving huge numbers of animals around the country, for export to Europe, to winter pastures, to abattoirs for slaughter or just to introduce rams to ewes to ensure next year's crop of lambs.

All this has been thrown into chaos by the avalanche of movement restrictions imposed under EU rules by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. "We now have to spend half our time looking at arbitrary lines on Defra maps," says Mr Langrish, "just to see where we can and can't move our animals."