The right medicine

Calling the vet can be stressful because it is expensive. So how can you budget for veterinary fees on your smallholding, asks Charlotte Cooper?

- Charlotte Cooper

When you run a small farm there are many demands on your money — both from expected costs and those that appear out of the blue. One of the “known unknowns” — to quote a certain American politician — is veterinary fees. You can budget for routine vet visits, for vaccinations and treatments, but there will always be unforeseen emergencies.

As yet there are no insurance policies covering farm animals for vets’ fees in the same way that your dog, cat or horse may be covered, so how do you ensure that you can put enough by for those contingencies without wiping out your savings?

GET THE BOOK

A useful budgeting tool for the penny conscious farmer is the John Nix Pocketbook for Farm Management. This annual publication sets out the average costs and returns for each type of farming enterprise, from goat dairying to glamping, and includes the running expenses for most farmyard animals.

The information is gleaned from official figures from Defra, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and other sources, so it is geared to the more intensive farmer, but it gives a handy clue to expected outlay (see opposite, far right).

According to the Pocketbook, a ewe costs the farmer an average of between £8 and £11 each year in vet routine fees — for wormers, vaccines and flystrike and foot treatments. However, farmers with smaller numbers in their flocks will not have the same economy of scale as bigger farms when treating their sheep. Buying a wormer that will treat 50 sheep for £55 is less economical when you only have six to treat, for example. Therefore, the cost to the smallholder is likely to be higher.

ECONOMIES OF SCALE