foot and mouth 7 years ago

hi everybody,
firstly, it's great to hear from you and how things are going, keep on sharing.
secondly, things are busy but well here, but something i really wanted to share with you already occured two weeks ago (talk about busy).

we have a gathering every sunday, and week before lasts was in memory of all the animals that got "culled", meaning needlessly and cruelly slaughtered, during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001.
For this farm here, as for so many others, it was a massively traumatic event in every respect, and basically things have only just more or less caught up again with what there was before that - can't find the right word - that unspeakable thing.
imagine from one day to the next having an empty and deserted farm, where all that is left are a few chickens that only remind you of what the place actually should be like, and all your good breeding stock, completely healthy thriving creatures that weren't any harm to anybody, the animals you've loved and cared for, killed and burnt and wasted.

what we did in memory of them, very fittingly as i found, was that we got together, at least twenty or thirty of us in the afternoon, and stirred and sprayed 500, treating it as a reinforcement and a remembrance of the cycles that are sustained by the land that we sprayed. because in the circle between the soil, the grass, the cows and the manure, all those dead animals are still present in this place, and even after we have lost them needlessly, we are still benefitting from their gifts, and we can use the new animals' manure (and after that sunday, i really looked at the "new" animals with a lot more reverence, thinking what an amazing privilege it is to have them) to express our gratefulness and love to the land off of which we live.

sorry this is such a preachy and soppy post, but that day really meant a lot to me and also deepened my understanding of what we do when we spray 500, or any preparations.
when you look at your animals tomorrow morning, or whenever, think for a second about how lucky you are to work with them.

katharina