Business as usual for our dairy farmers

Restaurants and cafes may have been closed, but cows still have to be milked, which makes it vital farmers are fit enough to work.

Guernsey Farmers’ Association president Michael Bray works Les Jaonnets Farm.

He said that his cows have no concept of the global pandemic – they still need care and husbandry as well as milking twice a day.

‘Our work carries on as usual irrespective of any restrictions lockdown brings,’ he said.

Guernsey’s dairy farmers have needed to introduce even tighter restrictions in line with Public Health guidelines, to ensure they remain fit and healthy so that they can continue to go about their daily routines without being compromised in anyway by the effects of the pandemic.

Covid has forced farmers to be even more vigilant.

‘Should one of us contract the virus, running our farms and finding sufficient cover would then become extremely challenging,’ he said.

Mr Bray’s family was one of many groups of islanders who, through the contact tracing programme,

have needed to self-isolate.

‘We cut ourselves off from everyone outside the immediate family, which raised all sorts of conflicts for us as we still had to continue to look after our cows’ welfare – we were unable to drop everything and walk away,’ he said.

‘During normal circumstances, if we are going to take a holiday we would have been preparing handovers on the farm for a good few weeks beforehand, which would not have happened if I’d had a positive Covid result.’

Julian Ogier from Le Hechet Farm said they had become masters of isolation.

‘For many of us milking starts at 5.25am every day and our work tends not to be finished much before 6.30pm, so it’s a long and fairly antisocial day with little or no interaction with anyone outside each of our farms,’ he said.

This winter has also been particularly wet, so many of the farmers are a little behind schedule from a land management point of view.

‘By now I would normally be preparing my fields ahead of spring,’ said Mr Ogier.

‘We also totally rely on our milking machinery to be in good working order but at the moment, when things go wrong, it isn’t very easy to get them fixed.

'Normally we would fly a specialist technician over from the UK but instead we have had to compromise,’ he said.

Guernsey Dairy managing director Andrew Tabel said he understood the difficult and challenging times the island’s dairy farmers were going through to ensure the dairy receives its regular supply of fresh local milk. What has made this period more demanding is the increase in milk sales offset by a reduction in raw milk intake as farmers deal with the effects of the recent cold spell.