Dear Sir,

I have been following with great interest and dismay Claire Taylor’s articles in The Scottish Farmer regarding on the poisoning of Dairy cattle by a contaminated liquid product wrongly sold as an accredited legitimate liquid fertiliser.

I like many others in the farming community are left fearful and wondering how this could have happened when we have so many regulatory bodies watching over us, supposedly making sure these products do not reach the farmgate and potentially enter the food chain whether the path be animal or human.

As a member of the farming community, I am left dumbfounded, probably like many others, in thinking - What the hell is going on? We expect Defra, SEPA, Environment Agency, Local and Regional County Council, Trading Standards, Red Tractor, QMS & SQC Farm assurance Schemes, NFU, Food Standard Agency, AIC, HSE and many others to be ensuring these dubious products do not exist. Obviously, they do, and with terrible consequences to the farmer’s stock, his livelihood, and his family.

We all pay our taxes, over 50% of the total subsidies from the EU never made it to the farmer or landowner, they went to fund these authorities or quangos and for what? We even pay levies and memberships to these organisations to represent us and watch our backs!

Nobody likes any of the agencies turning up on farm, uninvited, it potentially means we have done something wrong, so when a farmer approaches them directly, surely it must be serious? It appears that only Trading Standards have done anything to help in this situation and only since the story has been flagged up by the Scottish Farmer, The Environment Agency appear to be investigating the serious issues. What have the other bodies got to say for themselves? What a bloody disgrace! Are they trying to hide something which they already know about, but are not prepared to admit?

Over 50 to 60% of a dairy cow’s total daily diet is forage as grass, silage, whole- crop or maize. A suckler cow eats over 90% forage and a sheep even higher.

The smaller part of a ruminant’s diet is in the form of animal feed which is heavily regulated and all ingredients have to be declared. Why isn't fertiliser going down the same route and becoming fully transparent and accountable?

It is time for a sweeping change. I, for one, will be asking next time when I order my 20-10-10 Compound Fertiliser if there are any other undisclosed additives in it and I would urge all farmers to follow my example. When we are all spending vast amounts of money with these companies, I would expect full honesty and transparency and conceivably, the regulatory authorities will tighten up these laws and implement changes which can be enforced.

I could say more but my thoughts keep returning to these poor farmers who obviously have been shunned by the fertiliser company, and in some cases by their Insurers, left to rot and die like their stock. It's like a modern-day David and Goliath event with their army of shareholders and fat cat bosses using everything they have to prevent them from taking responsibility for their actions, meanwhile thinking about their next exotic holiday or which colour their next Porsche or Ferrari will be.

We, as farmers take the stewardship of our land very seriously as land custodians and if this situation is allowed to go unchallenged, it undermines the work we do to protect the natural environment.

These farmers deserve our support for their dogged determination to find out what occurred and to strongly motivate the authorities to assist and to help clean and eradicate these chemicals from their land so that they can farm again in a proper fashion. I hope other affected farmers are brave enough to come forward and add grist to the mill and put an end to these dreadful episodes taking place in the future.

Name and address supplied