Due to being so far north and daylight in summer months lasting almost 20 hours in summer time the cattle graze outdoors. So also sheep .
And when a major new road cuts into farmland , traffic lights are introduced to enable the farmer to activate it to get his animals for milking .

Scottish fruit berries are highly prized ..again due to long daylight hours in summer.
In ABERDEEN esp we r very lucky. The local dairy makes its own ice cream, butter ,etc and it is v good.

” Battery farming of chickens ” is being phased out. Chickens are now allowed to go outside .

Now it is all about ” food miles ” to cut down on use of fuel and CO2 emission.
Buy local has become the slogan.
U.K. and in Europe, local markets exist…..local farmers bring their produce to market. Aberdeen has one too.

EU has a lot of legislation regarding almost everything. Hence most of the farmers voted to come out of the EU. We will know only in two years time what the full outcome of BREXIT will be . EU has said that negotiations can start only after the severance happens . There is talk that EU will be officially notified in 2017.,and severance happens two years from the date of notification.
And there is talk that the House of Lords may veto BREXIT ..we will know only after the summer recess.

I found it quite interesting and very organised Diary in USA. It will be nice to know how are conditions prevalent in India.
With regards.
Ghansham

Your articles not only contain great informative vale but transport the reader into another era and nostalgia.

Like many people of our times we also had a cow and poultry at our home.

I often wish to recreate that now but despite all the resources available now..i have not been able to do it.

i think i m getting old.

thanks again and regards

Pasteurised cow’s milk is considered the best feed for calves. However, milk replacer is used to reduce costs.

regards,
J Thomas

Milk replacer is not claimed to be better than cow’s milk. Raw milk is considered unsuitable because of bacteria etc. So, the best option is considered to be pasteurised milk. Milk replacer is used to reduce the cost.

Regards,
J Thomas

You may not know who I am but I do read your blogs every time I can and enjoy it very much. I live in Chennai and am a biotechnologist working with plants and animals. I thought I should mention that its not just cows and chicken that are subjected to such stress full lives by farmers all over the world. Fish, pigs and other animals we eat have to endure so much before they are ‘tabled’.

I have a degree in animal husbandry and feel it is my duty to try and correct things for these animals we raise for our stomachs. In our desperation to make animal husbandry profitable we have been feeding animals all kinds of chemicals in their feed mostly antibiotics and hormones to get them to grow faster. Man has finally realised that the antibiotics and hormones are ending up on human plates and causing untold damage to humans! I guess it is poetic justice for what we do to those lovely creatures. I work with algae and my team have recently discovered an algal species which contains huge quantities of beta glucan which is a soluble polysaccharide that boosts the immune response of animals that consume beta glucan. This means we can reduce the amount of anti-biotics and hormones in animal and fish feed and save our own species the problem of antibiotic resistance. We have also found ways of feeding fish and shrimp natural live feed rather than compounded feed and in this way we have reduced mortality in the ponds by almost 25%. This is akin to what the ‘Simply natural dairy’ folks are doing.

There is hope yet for mankind and animalkind.

Warm regards and happy blogging

Sailendra Bhaskar

Greetings.
Thank you for the lovely letter that you sent me. It will be a prized possession,
I am attaching a newspaper clipping. I am getting some photographs also. Will get them delivered
Regards
Jaideep