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he double whammy of BSE followed by foot and moth
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laid many livestock hauliers low teve McQueen finds out how one operator has dapted its business to survive and thrive.
it's hard to think of any sector of the road haulage industry that has taken more knocks than the livestock sector over the past five years. French lamb wars, BSE with its beef export bans and the disaster of the foot and mouth crisis finished off many a well run business. The vivors find themselves in a business that has nged beyond all recognition. Take the expeice ofJohn V Brooks Transport
he company's BSE experiences were typienough: "We were moving hundreds of le a week," says partner Paul Brooks. ddenly we were down to 54 inside a couple Lays. Markets that were once alhrong with )ensed dairy cattle are no longer the places / were.
Beforehand, you might have half a market of cull cows and that all generated trade. y all went into the food chain. That's all gone 1. They no longer enter the food chain—catwer 30 months old have to go directly into government's slaughter scheme."
ve yegkrs
ok all of five years to get the company back position where animal movements were roaching the pre-BSE level.., just in time he arrival of foot and mouth.
)ur core work used to be markets and desale butchers," Brooks explains. wever, after the outbreak many customers p traditionally sold through markets have I forced to sell to wholesale butchers direct, and many still do. Markets have lost business and livestock is travelling far greater distances than it would have done in the past."
Measures to combat the spread of the disease meant additional movement restrictions, additional welfare procedures—and additional operational expenses. "Our closest disinfecting centre charged us i5o to disinfect pre-cleaned vehicles," he reports. "That's a vehicle that had already been cleaned down after the stock had been delivered. You can't pass all of those costs on to the customer: some of them had to be absorbed.
"Some of our competitors were able to get their own depots designated as disinfection centres. That gave them a significant advantage," he points out.
Simply waiting for the work to come back again was not an option. "We found that a lot of farms had serious cashflow problems," says Brooks. "For many, it wasn't the case that they wouldn't pay, but that they couldn't pay. We had to look at finding some alternative sources of income."
Last year Paul Brooks became an equal partner in the business established by his father, John V Brooks, who had begun dealing in stock before moving into animal transport. Paul has always been involved with the business operations and his wife Lynda has also
FOUNDED 1959.
FLEET
played her part in keeping the business on track, but the search for new opportunities began to produce some tangible results once the formal partnership was forged.
"We've always had access to some of the agricultural fringe work," he says. "We've taken straw; we've even moved entire farms. And through an association with another animal transport operator we've started getting into more work on the construction side. That's something we hope to develop further."
Short shrift
This sort of switch takes careful planning for an animal transport specialist. A truck that's just dropped off a load of livestock would get short shrift from a transport manager if it turns up for a general traffic collection. "Sheep out and general haulage back, doesn't work," says Brooks. "The kind of load that you set out with in the morning is the kind you are stuck with—but we are looking at whether we could get some sort of freight back with a refit to the trailers.
"With the right approach, it might be possible to introduce modifications that will enable us to carry pallets back, for example."
While research goes on in that area, other alternatives are emerging in the traction sector: "We started doing this about a year ago,
moving shipping containers out of Felixstowe. The vehicle is dedicated to traction and we work for a single company that sets all the work up for us. We've always been wary about this kind of activity in the past because we thought it was more of a rock bottom form of transport activity. So far ifs proved to be a move that we are fairly satisfied with."
That vehicle is almost permanently away from the depot, with the driver away from home for up to four nights a week. Drivers prepared to do that kind of work are at a premium, but the driver shortage is nothing new in the livestock sector.
"Cattle can lash out and the untrained driver could easily be felled with a single kick, so as well as trying to find an experienced driver we have to find an experienced stockman as well and with a national driver shortage i not easy," he says. "After the foot and mot disease outbreak I half expected a queue ex-stockmen keen to retrain, looking : firms such as ours, but it hasn't materialis. What we have done in the past is train fa: workers who have expressed an interest driving and hang on to them by keeping rates up."
This policy seems to have worked: one the firm's five drivers has been with it for years.
Although there is a determination expand his business horizons, Brooks is r olute about keeping a foothold in livestt transport. He says it's in his blood: "Peo: don't make fortunes out of this line of we but it is away of life."