With bluetongue cases continuing to rise this season, The AG Show team's focus is on South West England, one of the hardest-hit parts of the country, to find out what it's really like on the ground.

We catch up with a Cornish beef, sheep and arable farmer whose livestock have been affected, and hear from a Devon-based vet about just how busy things have been, plus the latest on vaccination efforts.

The message is clear: don't wait until bluetongue is on your doorstep before taking action. Support and advice are available through the AHDB Bluetongue Virus Hotline on 024 7771 0386.

Plus, we look at how this summer's heatwaves have added to the challenges facing UK dairy farmers and what it could mean for the months ahead.

SOME USEFUL BITS (FROM AHDB & BEYOND)

Bluetongue virus latest news | AHDB

Bluetongue virus update - 5 August 2026 | AHDB Webinar

How have the recent heatwaves impacted GB milk production? | AHDB

Hot weather and heat extremes | AHDB

Dry weather and drought | AHDB

Support for farmers | AHDB

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I think, guys and gals, this is an AG Show first.

Charlotte, Hannah, Phil, you're all on at the very same time for the first ever time.

Hello.

What's going on? Nice to meet you all. I've met you all individually or I've met two of you at a time, but I've not met all of you at the same time, have I?

The stars have aligned.

It's about time. Well, this is great. We've got nothing to talk about. Shall we just get on with the show?

Yeah, let's get into it.

Hi, I'm Charlotte Forkes-Rees.

I'm Phil Maiden.

And I'm Hannah Clarke. And welcome to The AG Show.

This week we're going big on bluetongue. Given the recent spike in cases in the Southwest.

I hate going and checking the stock now. It used to be my favorite part of the day. You're going out and you're thinking, that sheep lying down that otherwise you wouldn't second glance.

You're like, I need to get that up, I need to check. And everywhere you look you just think, what on earth am I going to stumble across?

Now we've got the latest on vaccinations and we'll be hearing from a vet.

Cases have way overtaken anyone's ability to be able to sufficiently vaccinate their time once the virus reaches that part of the country. So it takes three weeks for the vaccine to work once it's been administered. And blue tongue cases are increasing exponentially.

Plus, we can't ignore another big impact on farming, the summer of heat waves. They seem to be non stop as we bring you up to speed with how the dairy sector has fared.

A reminder, new episodes of the ag show drop every Wednesday at midday. Available wherever you get your podcasts with.

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You know the email agshowdb.org.uk Now, I know we talked about blue tongue last week, but we make no apologies for doing so again, to be honest, as the virus remains one of the biggest talking points in the livestock sector right now, I think it's fair to say BTV3 cases are continuing to rise across parts of the UK and there are fresh calls for farmers to stay vigilant.

Yep, vaccination is increasingly being highlighted by industry bodies and vets as the most effective tool available to Help protect herds and flocks as midge activity remains high.

So what is the latest picture on the ground and what do farmers need to know about vaccines, availability and protecting their livestock this season? Returning to continue the conversation is AHDB's animal health and welfare scientist, Zoe Lloyd.

We've also got two first timers on the ag show, Maria Warne Elston, AKA that Farming Mum, a beef, sheep and arable farmer from Cornwall who's been having to deal with infected cattle.

And we also have joining us, Exmoor based vet Rachel Foster. Zoe, let's start with the basics then. Where are we with the cases? Where in the country are we seeing cases at the moment?

And what exactly is classified as a case of blue tongue?

We have seen 326 cases in England, seven cases in Wales and one case in Scotland. So these are recorded from the 1st of July and one case is one positive premise.

So that's one farm or one holding that's tested positive for blue tongue. We have been seeing more severe clinical signs than in previous years and a very high mortality, particularly within sheep.

But all of these cases so far this season have been B2, B3.

So that's what we're seeing at the moment.

Because just to re clarify to anyone who is unclear, there are different strains of blue tongue that have been prevalent in the UK at different times. That's right, isn't it?

So last year we had BTV8 cases as well. But it's important to note that there are 29 other serotypes of blue tongue. So yes, we have all the cases so far this vector season.

So that's since the 1st of July have been BTV3.

So Zoe, how severe is the situation right now?

So I think I would like to call upon Rachel to share with us some of her experiences down in the southwest for that one.

So we first started to see blue tongue cases in the North Devon area fairly early in July. Just one or two cases to start off with that were reported as suspects.

And from there on in the cases have just continued to spread in a alarming exponential way over the following five weeks or so.

Since bluetongue was first detected in the UK this summer, the clinical signs seem to be a lot more severe this year than they have been in previous years. So we've seen an awful lot of sick animals, mainly sheep.

Sheep seem to be more severely affected by blue tongue, but we have seen cases in cattle as well, although cattle do tend to recover a bit more easily than sheep do.

And then in terms of mortality in your area. Have you seen a big increase?

There has been a big increase in mortality, I'd say, generally. So all the fallen stock collectors in our area are reporting that they are beyond capacity for collecting fallen stock.

Obviously that could be losses for whatever reason, and not just blue tongue. But compared to the seasonal norm, they're sort of saying it may be like eight times higher demand than it normally, normally is.

So, yeah, there's definitely increased mortality within individual flocks. That mortality very much seems to vary. The disease itself seems to be ever so slightly different on every single farm that is affected.

And certainly mortality rates, we're often seeing maybe up to 1% mortality across a whole flock, but individual management groups, that mortality could be higher in some cases, especially stressed animals, so especially ewes, because we're at weaning times, so weaning is a stressful time and animals with concurrent diseases. So there's been a bit of parasite challenge this summer, especially with Haemonchus.

Obviously we've got nutritional stress as well, and maybe used with iceberg diseases and other such things, are going to find it much more difficult to recover from blue tongue than more healthy animals.

And how hard has it been for you as a vet working where, you know you're seeing such an explosion in cases like it must have been, it must be quite tough for you as well as the farmers who are, who are going through this issue at the moment.

It's very demanding for everybody. Blue tongue is an absolutely horrible disease, it seems. It's really painful. Animals are really, really sick with it.

They go off their food, sometimes they become recumbent. They need a lot of nursing care, a lot of individual att for the severely affected animals to help them to recover.

Farmers have reported that they don't enjoy going to see their stock anymore because it's every day there's a couple more cases or a couple more cases. So every single time they go around and check their animals, they really don't know exactly what they're going to find that day.

And the practice, we've had extra, obviously extra visits and extra phone calls. So the demand on the practice itself, in terms of our time and resources has been massively increased.

So all the vets have been extremely busy building all those inquiries, helping farmers, putting farmers minds at risk, helping farmers with ordering vaccine and sorting out their vaccine requirements, as well as actually visiting farms, examining stock and delivering bad news when we think that they probably have got blue tongue and obviously offering advice to everyone as well around how best to treat and look after these animals.

And coming Back to you, Zoe. Were we expecting to see the sorts of levels we're seeing at the moment?

I think it is really, really difficult to predict what the disease is going to do as you sort of start off the vector season.

It's important to note we are still very early on in the vector season, but I would encourage farmers to report suspicions of the disease immediately to apha. This really helps build a better picture of the disease spread and what it's doing.

Bluetongue is also notifiable, so we do legally have to report DEFRA are funding diagnostic testing to three affected animals too. There is more available, is more information available on this on the. Gov UK website.

And I think it's important to note as well that in England and Wales there are no negative repercussions or restrictions that are imposed following the confirmation of a positive case on your farm, as both Wales and England are countrywide restricted zones and have been since last year.

Okay, so, Rachel, I have to ask a really simple question. How much worse can we expect it to get before it gets better?

So if we think about what's happened in North Devon, so if we go back to the beginning of July, there was one or two suspect cases at the start and we started to really advise farmers that they needed to get on board with vaccination because it looked like the vaccine was going to. The virus was going to spread within the area.

And what we've found actually, is that the cases have way overtaken anyone's ability to be able to sufficiently vaccinate their time once the virus reaches that part of the country. So it takes three weeks for the vaccine to work once it's been administered.

And blue tongue cases are increasing exponentially, day on day, week on week, far overtaking anything that you could possibly keep up with once the virus has arrived.

So I don't know what you're thinking, Rachel, but last year we noticed during winter that the midges were around even during January months. Do you think that might be the case this year? That infected midges are still hanging around come wintertime?

Midges are, yeah, midges are around in the wintertime, but the virus has set temperatures that it can replicate within the midges. So over the winter there wouldn't be virus replication. But certainly overwintered midges might be why the disease re emerged so early this year.

And one of the messages that we have been trying to get out there is about vaccination and the fact that it's not too late to vaccinate, despite us talking about the fact that There is a significant issue in the Southwest and that could potentially spread further. Vaccination is still one of the key tools we've got, isn't it?

Absolutely. We are recommending to all our clients to get vaccinated as soon as they possibly can.

The midge active season is likely to run until at least November, and because the disease is a midge borne disease, it's entirely unpredictable which animals in your flock or herd have been exposed and which ones haven't. And so the ones that haven't been exposed potentially could still be at risk of contracting blue tongue later on in the season.

So the sooner you can get vaccinated, the sooner your protection starts.

And some of our clients have been saying that after they've administered the vaccine, even when they're in the midst of the outbreak and they've got cases on their farm, after a couple of weeks post vaccination, the number of cases that they see are decreasing. So the rate of cases is slowing down and also the severity of the signs is starting to be less. So they're having less severe cases and less losses.

So there's a clear benefit to vaccinating, even in the face of the outbreak, in stock that has been previously vaccinated and it's up to date with its vaccinations. We haven't seen any clinical cases in our practice.

And just for anyone who is struggling at the moment to get hold of a vaccine, what advice have you got for any farmer who is currently trying to source supplies?

Speak to your vet, get on the waiting list. All the companies are working their hardest to get more doses of vaccine into the uk.

So get on a waiting list and then the sooner you're on the waiting list, the sooner you'll get to the top of the list and vaccine be supplied to you once it's available.

So there's a clear message there. Don't be put off by being told there's not vaccine available. Still, pursue getting on the list.

And we'll be back with Rachel, Maria and Zoe after the break. You're listening to the Ag Show. A reminder if you want to get in touch with us, please, please do. We'd love to hear from you.

The email is agshowdb.orguk and we're talking about the really important topic of blue tongue.

So we've been hearing from Rachel Vette about her experience with cases and the impact on the practice, and also from our very own Zoe Lloyd about vaccination. I wonder now if we could talk to Maria, who is a farmer that's been affected by bluetongue recently.

Maria, when did you sort of first realise that blue tongue might be having an effect on your farm and what was going through your mind?

The first time we realised was three days after we agreed to vaccinate. It was about two weeks ago. We noticed a sign straight away and knew exactly what it was and what we needed to do.

We had a bullock hanging out down by the stream, which is quite a high mid populated area. But not once did we think it could be infected with blue tongue. So maybe a bit of a hindsight on our part there.

The bullock was lifting its hind legs up like, almost like it was dancing side to side obviously because its feet were quite sore, quite warm there and red. We then looked a bit closer, noticed it was severely drooling and there was also lots of sores around its muzzle area.

So we brought this animal in along with another one that was hanging out with it. Got the vet out. The vet had already seen seven cases that morning.

So she came to us as quickly as she could, gave some antibiotics, gave some metacam and talked us through every single step. It was really, really scary. It was really eerie.

We also had two other bullocks in another field within the same valley that didn't come up for their corn.

And I remember me and dad literally just stood on our, almost on our hands and knees looking at these animals and you could fear like you could literally feel the tense environment when we were looking at them and it just felt really scary, really eerie. And this fear of we don't know what's about to come, are we?

Is like everything on our farm about to go down with blue tongue and we're not gonna know where to look?

That's so difficult. I mean, what sort of position are you at right now with your stock and vaccination and cases with the infected stock?

We're currently one bullock down. That one decided to pop its clogs yesterday after having countless amounts of antibiotics and Metacam.

And we've also been given a vitamin injection as well to try and encourage a bit more drinking and eating there. But I think it was just so swollen and it had the infection like it had it really severely. So there wasn't much we could do.

We think it had pneumonia on top of it as well. So the secondary infection had already like set in and was causing us a lot of problems.

So by the time we had brought the animal in and dosed it two days later, we looked at the animal and we all just turned to each other and went don't think this one's got hope in hell even then. We tried our best as much as we could. The other one's now gone back out with the other animals and is completely healthy now.

No signs, no temperature, really well in itself. So really happy with that one. That bullock pulled through. But we're vaccinating.

We've now done all of our ewes, all of our breeding ewes this year and we've now started to through our bullocks as well and cattle.

And it kind of came as a no brainer that after those two animals came down with it, we were going to vaccinate and it's going to be religious for us now because I don't want to experience that again, I really don't. I'm almost getting a little bit teary talking about it now because it feels so vulnerable. And let's be real, nobody likes to feel that vulnerable.

Especially when you're talking about the stock. You've put so much time, you've thought about the bloodlines, you've spent hours of a day just making sure they're healthy.

And then this little midgie comes along to change the whole plan. So we are vaccinating here on out every year.

You know, we're seeing a lot of severe cases in sheep at the moment, but the fact that you've also seen it in cattle I think is an excellent reminder that this is a serious disease for cattle as well. And so that's, you know, definitely a watch point for the producers. You said that you decided to vaccinate before you started to see clinical signs.

So I'm wondering what, what spurred you to decide to vaccinate in the first place?

I had been pushing for quite a few weeks before this to try and get the vaccine into our animals.

And it wasn't until all of us managed to sit down at the same time with a cup of tea in our hand and my mum started the conversation with, so are we gonna vaccinate? Which for an old fashioned traditional farmer is quite a conversation to have in the first place.

Yeah.

Because what do you mean we're about to change things.

Yeah.

So I think just that situation and that convers occurring in the first place just showed how fearful we were of it happening before we even got it.

And then once we had all decided, it was kind of a case of looking around the room and realising, hold on a minute, we're actually all petrified right now.

How has the disease kind of changed your day to day management of the stock on farm?

I Hate going and checking the stock now.

It used to be my favorite part of the day, just whizzing around on a core bike, fresh air in your face, looking out at all the animals just grazing or sitting down with the sun beaming into your eyes. I love it. It gives me tingles just thinking about it. But now it's quite scary.

You're going out and you're thinking, that sheep lying down that otherwise you wouldn't second glance. You're like, I need to get that up, I need to check. And everywhere you look you just think, what on earth am I gonna stumble across now?

Cause although we are in a position right now where I'm gonna say we're lucky, touch wood, just at this moment, I'm gonna talk about not in the future, that we haven't seen sheep. If that does happen, it's a feeling that we're going to be doomed because how many is it going to affect?

Are we going to be able to get on top of it clinically, are we going to be able to catch like we're checking out animals every day. But the blue tongue in the cattle came across so quickly. They were healthy and happy and running around the day before.

So how, how quickly is it going to affect the sheep if they're affected worse? I'm down in Cornwall, I know our neighbors up in Devon, they're having it a lot worse than what we are.

But even down here, everyone you talk to, it's all the same conversation. And I'm not talking about the weather this time. It's all blue tongue.

Even the farmers that don't tend to get involved with the fear mongering kind of conversations, even they're joining in. And I think that just shows how substantial this outbreak is.

This time my dad made a comment and said, this is giving me the kind of feeling I got when foot of mouth came about.

And that's a hell of a statement, isn't it?

It is. Especially when I came out of foot of mouth. That was the reason I'm here. Hate to see what comes out of this one.

Thank you for sharing your experience, Maria. I appreciate how difficult it must be, but I'm touching wood for you that, you know, hopefully things are starting to look up.

Maria, you mentioned that you will vaccinate every year. Now, what would your message be to those farmers that aren't in an area that is currently affected?

Do you think it's something that they should be thinking about the same way that you do?

This time last year we weren't in an affected area. You maybe heard the conversation once in a ballpark and now it's everywhere. So I think it's one of those things.

You can't predict which way the wind's gonna change, which means you can't predict where the midg.

And I just think it's better to be safer than sorry because at the end of the day, vaccinating a few hundred sheep is covered in only a handful of deaths. But I think in amongst all of this, we've got so much. It is. It is fear, isn't it? There is a lot of fear around this conversation and just.

It's an uneasy conversation to have with anyone because you don't know what's about to happen. But I think we can all find comfort in the fact that, like, now we're all coming together and talking about it and we're all leaning on one another.

So I think in amongst all the scary news that we're seeing, we have got each other in a comforting sense.

Yeah, there's a lot of people in the same boat, aren't there? So the main question is where can listeners who are concerned about Blue Tongue and whether to vaccinate or not and the potential implications.

Zoe, where can they go to find more information to help them decide what to do?

Thanks, Hannah.

We appreciate this is a really difficult situation for farmers, as Maria talked us through there, so I just wanted to highlight that support is available and we have contact details for several organisations available on the AHDB website and I'm sure we can add the link to this in the description box as well. We also have the Blue Tongue virus hotline and the Rument Health and Welfare email inbox where you can place any queries you have about the virus.

We can leave the details for this as well because I appreciate that there are lots of questions that farmers have at this moment in time and as Rachel alluded to earlier as well, so please do make use of those. And we are holding regular webinars, so please do check out the AHDB website for further information and to hear from industry and speakers as well.

If you have missed any of the webinars, we do have them all available on YouTube as well, so you can listen back and catch up on those too.

Well, that was some really important conversation I think that we've had today. Zoe, Maria and Rachel, thank you so much for your time and input into this really important topic.

I think it's probably just worth clarifying the point around cases and prevalence in cattle and sheep. Rachel, are you able just to Talk around that point with Castle.

Yeah.

So one of the hidden side effects, obviously, at the moment we are seeing clinical cases in sick animals, but blue tongue also has a significant effect on reproduction and fertility. So even if you don't see any symptoms in your cattle right now, there is a potential that you could have a decreased fertility rate.

You could have abortions, you could see deformed or dummy calves born in the future.

So this disease carries on long after the acute effects are seen, and all of which can be protected if the animals are vaccinated before they meet the virus. Likewise with sheep, especially male breeding animals.

Fertility is affected if males, either bulls or rams, are infected with blue tongue, but the vaccine doesn't affect fertility and can very much protect them.

Let's finish off this episode with another look at the weather, as this summer's heat waves have piled pressure on farms across the country, affecting crops, grass growth and water supplies at a time when many businesses are already facing tough conditions.

It's led to our earliest harvest in at least 20 years and there doesn't seem to be much letup as temperatures are set to climb again this week, with more areas of England now officially in drought.

I recently caught up with our lead analyst for dairy, Susie Stannard, to understand the impact it's had on the dairy sector. Susie began our chat by setting the scene.

It's been interesting because the markets have been really difficult this year because we've been in a fairly long period of kind of universal global oversupply, which is relatively unusual because often we have one region doing really well and other regions doing not so well, but everywhere has been doing well at, at the same time. And that's really just meant too much milk, which has really put pressure on commodity values.

So the UK had a really strong milk year last year, the last milk year, so that was up 5%. And we saw a lot of growth coming from the EU and US particularly.

And so milk prices have been really quite low this year because commodity markets have been low. So because of that, the price of butter, as an example, went from near £7,000 a ton to low 3,000. And we haven't seen those levels since COVID times.

And that's meant that farmgate prices have been, have been really low.

So on average we're looking at 34 pence per litre, but that could be as low as 28 pence per litre versus a cost of production which probably sits in the. In the sort of low 40s. So really, really difficult. Where we kind of were then is we sort of felt.

What normally happens is in the summer all the traders go on holiday and you know, the markets are kind of go really quiet and there's no real sense of direction for a time. So we were expecting it to be quite till September.

And then what happened was we got this series of big heat waves and that's really then put pressure on milk production and that's just, just made a real change in the markets right now.

Yeah. And how significant has that been on markets, the effect of the heat?

Well, it's been very significant, but there have been a few complicating factors at the same time which we need to bear in mind. So in the first heat wave, which was the end of May, we were still seeing the influence of volume control schemes.

So, you know, putting really low bee prices on milk over a certain volume. We had falling milk prices going on, we were having seasonal declines and then, and then we have the impact of the heat wave itself.

So we've tried to model this by kind of looking at seasonal averages and trying to isolate the influence of the different factors. So what we found was that the heat wave slowed milk production right down.

Before the first heat wave we were running at sort of maybe 1.6 to 2% above the five year average. That dropped to 0.4% above. So quite a significant slowdown.

That was worth probably about 5.8 million litres in the second heat wave, which is, which happened late June and there wasn't a very long gap between the two sort of heat waves, but in the gap we were about 2% above the five year average. That then dropped to 2.9% below by the peak of the heat wave. So we reckon that we've probably lost about another 12.7 million liters there.

And that data is just going up to the 4th of July. We need to kind of update that.

But the rest of July has seen decline continue, so that will be higher now and it really has had a big effect and it feels as though there's been a cumulative impact as well. So the first heat wave not quite so bad.

The second heat wave I think was hotter, but then also the cows were stressed for longer and that's made a big difference.

So we've gone from a significant oversupply situation and some very harsh volume management schemes to processors increasingly feeling quite anxious about milk supplies. And that's really. He heated up things like the spot milk market as well. So a big change there.

So that's a massive swing in the market over that time.

Just on the, on like the Physical production side, for those that might not be too au fait with dairy production, could you just explain a little bit more about stressed cows heat stress and what that actually does to production levels?

Cows produce quite a lot of heat and particularly dairy cows when they're, when they're lactating and they produce a lot of heat in the room and when they eat. So they're really prone to heat stress.

When we start to see temperatures above about 20 degree Celsius with moderate humidity, that can be enough to trigger heat stress in cows. Obviously the hotter it is, the worse it gets.

And that can have an even bigger effect for those cows that are particularly high yielding and it tends to have worse impacts as well.

When you see heat at night, so you might have heard of people talking about tropical nights, that's when the temperature doesn't drop below the sort of low 20s and then they just don't really get any, any respite.

So in terms of what they, what it does to them, they'll, they'll spend more time panting and trying to keep cool and standing rather than kind of lying down and relaxing. They won't eat as much, so their feed intake drops and they, they sort of rest less and, and, and ruminate, chew their cud less.

So that can all lead to lower milk yields and also fewer milk components. So we might see less protein in the milk as well.

So some studies report production losses of several kilograms of milk per cow per day when they're under moderate to severe heat stress conditions. Not only that can also affect their reproductive performance, so it can impact their fertility. They might not conceive as well.

And we might see more sort of instances of abortion as well. There is some research as well that shows that there can be even longer lasting impact.

So if, if a cow is in late pregnancy and she's exposed to heat stress, that calf that she has might never do quite as well in terms of her productivity in her lifetime.

So I think, you know, we have had several episodes of this now, but you know, it's not a one and done that that impact can, can last for, for a long time.

Yeah, it's not just the immediate impact, it's, it's going forwards, isn't it? That's also a bit of a watch point.

Yeah.

That talking about looking ahead, we've obviously seen quite a lot of volatility in the dairy markets recently. What do you think is going to happen for the rest of the year?

Yeah, so it's a really interesting question. We have had some big impacts on what's going on with milk prices and, well, particularly spot milk.

So the spot milk market was sitting sort of late teens, in the twenties, that leapt up as high as 50 pence per litre. And at that price it sells. It pays to sell milk to cover the liquid shortfall for some processes rather than making commodities.

So that means we're seeing less butter produced, less skim milk powder produced and less cheese will have been made. So that might start to put a little bit of pressure on. We've also seen quite big impacts on bulk cream, so those prices have gone up 10%.

Cheddar went up 6% back in July and skim milk powder also, and butter going up. So the heat wave did affect the continent as well, particularly France and Germany, and that.

That is having an impact in terms of sort of wider milk production. However, some of the other countries, so New Zealand, Australia, the US, are still having a very good time in terms of milk production.

So that will put. Put a bit of. A bit of a cap on it. So I think what we probably need to bear in mind is some of the other factors as well.

So we've got the influence of heat stress, but then we've also got the influence of what milk prices are doing now, potentially disease risk as well. So we're seeing more and more blue tongue virus emerging, particularly in the Southwest. So that could all play a factor.

So overall, I think the forecast in terms of what's going to happen next with milk production is probably fairly bearish.

We just really need to keep an eye on when the traders come back in September, they'll be sort of setting market direction on where do they think things are going to go next. There is possibility, if milk continues to contract down, that we will start to see milk prices coming up a bit more.

We've already seen quite a lot of announcements, positive announcements for August, but in the sort of 2 to 3 pence range. Will we start to see more as we kind of go through the autumn?

That is a possibility, but I think we need to wait till September to really feel a bit surer on that.

And it's worth flagging that all of this insight and evidence is available on the website and you guys produce updates and articles on this sort of stuff. Stuff all the time. So is there anything you want to flag in particular to listeners?

We're republishing the forecast, which will be in October time, so a little way ahead.

But yeah, just as you said, let's just keep an eye on things, keep an eye on our publications and then hopefully we can start to deliver some better news as we move into the autumn.

Bit of a heavier one for us this week.

I think it's tough topics there, particularly when you're hearing about how Blue Tongue's impacting some of our guests and, yeah, difficult to hear and the emotion really coming through.

And it doesn't feel, you know, like the weather's giving us much less up either, is it when you hear what Susie's got to say about how that's impacting on dairy.

And actually kind of coming up in the next couple of shows, I've had a couple of interviews with farmers and they're talking about their experiences with the drought and what that's meant for them and their farming practices for this year, but also thinking about the years ahead. But that is all we have got time for this episode.

If there is anything that any of our listeners would like us to cover in future shows, please do get in touch. The email is agshodb.com or reach out on any of our socials. Otherwise we will see you next week.