The customary trail of blood and feathers was spotted two farms away. The farmgate straw was becoming less and less convincing, and farmers began to sense that the ones who got the disease might well be the lucky ones. At least they get compensation. The ones left behind see costs spiralling and income prospects at zero. Animals stuck the wrong side of a road have been dying in the snow.
Nothing can go to market.
Getting the disease could seem a better bet. The truth of course is that they vary. But none of them constructed the crazed system of subsidies, designed to benefit the French peasantry of the 1950s, which has favoured the rich and the unscrupulous at the expense of the ordinary farmer, and the consumer. This feels now like the final crisis of British agriculture, as we have known it. It is hard to imagine any upshot other than a ruined countryside, producing less, dearer and worse food.