Late summer places a kind of pressure on mixed holdings that no other part of the farming year quite matches, and stock losses that happen while the combine is running have a habit of arriving at the worst possible moment. Martlands provides DEFRA approved fallen stock and ABP collection from a licensed base at Burscough in West Lancashire, and harvest season fallen stock collection is one of the busiest strands of the work through August and September. When every pair of hands is committed to the field, an animal found dead in the far corner of a grass ley still carries a legal clock that started the moment somebody spotted it.
Why Harvest Creates a Fallen Stock Problem That Other Months Do Not
The difficulty is not that more animals die during harvest. It is that fewer people are looking, and the ones who are looking are busy. On a mixed unit running cattle or sheep alongside combinable crops, the labour that would normally walk the stock twice a day is on the drill, the trailer or the grain dryer. Gaps of thirty-six or forty-eight hours between inspections are common at this time of year, and a carcass that has been lying in a hedge bottom through two warm days is a very different proposition to one found within a couple of hours.
That matters legally as well as practically. Under the Animal By-Products (Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2013, the duty of care requires fallen stock to be collected within twenty-four hours of discovery. The regulation attaches to discovery, not to death, which is why an honest inspection routine protects you and an infrequent one does not. If a keeper cannot demonstrate that stock were being checked at reasonable intervals, the twenty-four hour window offers far less shelter than it first appears to.
Machinery, Traffic and the Losses Nobody Plans For
Harvest brings unfamiliar vehicle movements onto tracks and headlands that stock are grazing alongside. Gates get left in the wrong position by contractors who do not know the holding, trailers throw up dust that unsettles youngstock, and animals that break out onto a road during a busy August evening are at real risk. Losses of this kind tend to be sudden, sometimes involve more than one animal, and frequently happen at a distance from the buildings where you would normally hold a carcass before collection. Our farm and fallen stock collection service is built around exactly that scenario, with a rapid-response fleet operating out of Burscough and same-day collection available where the situation demands it.
Grain and forage stores create a second, quieter risk. Spoiled feed, mouldy bales and overheated grain can cause illness in stock given access to them, and mortality from a feed-related incident often appears several days after the exposure rather than at the time. Where a veterinary surgeon suspects a feed cause and wants material examined, the animal must still be held and moved under the correct category and paperwork, and nothing about a diagnostic interest changes the disposal route.
Categorising Harvest Losses Correctly
Most farmed ruminants that die on the holding fall to be handled as Category 1 material, and that classification drives everything that follows. Category 1 material must go to an approved processing route and cannot be mixed with lower-risk streams under any circumstances. Martlands holds the licences to collect and process all three categories, and our Category 1 ABP collection operates under Animal By-Products Licence No APB/CCN21/373/8002 alongside Waste Carrier Licence CB/QE5406MT and Site Licence EAWML/100236.
The one harvest-season complication worth flagging is cattle age. Fallen cattle over forty-eight months of age require BSE testing, and that testing has to be carried out at an approved sampling facility. Martlands operates as a DEFRA approved processing and sampling facility, so a fallen cow taken from a Lancashire or Cheshire holding is sampled within the same licensed operation that collected it. There is no second carrier, no additional handover, and no gap in the chain of custody that an inspector could later question.
Storage Between Discovery and Collection
Harvest losses are often found a long way from the yard, and the temptation is to leave the animal where it lies until somebody has a spare hour. That is the wrong instinct in August. Warm weather accelerates decomposition sharply, scavenging birds and foxes spread material across neighbouring ground, and a carcass left in the open near a public footpath or a busy lane creates exactly the sort of complaint that brings an inspection with it. Move the animal to a hard-standing area away from watercourses, keep it covered and away from other stock, and book the collection. Our practical guide to safe on-farm storage of fallen stock sets out how to do this properly on holdings that have no dedicated collection point.
The Geography of a Late Summer Collection Round
The mixed farming belt we serve most heavily during harvest runs from the Fylde and the mosslands around Tarleton and Banks, east through the Ribble Valley, and south into the Cheshire dairy country. It is a region where arable and livestock sit side by side on the same holding far more often than they do in the pure arable counties, which is precisely why harvest and fallen stock collide here. Routes out of Burscough run onto the M58 and the M6 within minutes, which is what makes same-day response realistic across Lancashire fallen stock collection and the surrounding counties rather than something we can only promise close to the depot.
North of Preston the pattern shifts. Holdings around Garstang fallen stock collection and the Wyre valley tend to be dairy-led with a block of cereals grown for home feeding, so the harvest window is short, intense and heavily contracted out. The stock work suffers accordingly. Around Preston fallen stock collection and the surrounding parishes, the pressure comes from a different direction entirely, with holdings squeezed between growing settlements and a public that notices anything left in a field.
Paperwork You Will Be Glad of in October
Every Martlands collection generates a Commercial Document, and where the material is handled as waste, a Waste Transfer Note as well. During harvest these are easy to file badly, because the person signing at the gate is often whoever happens to be near the yard rather than the person who keeps the records. Set a rule now that every document goes into the same folder or the same photograph on the same phone, because a Red Tractor assessor working through your holding in the autumn will want the records for the whole year and will notice a two-month gap that lines up neatly with harvest.
Bookings are handled through the KoLeCt system, which gives each collection a traceable reference from the point the call is taken. As a member of the National Fallen Stock Company we can also take collections through NFSCO scheme arrangements where a holding is signed up to it.
Getting a Collection Booked During a Busy Week
The practical advice for August is simple. Do not wait for a convenient moment, because during harvest there is not one. Ring the collection through as soon as an animal is found, give the location clearly enough that a driver can reach it without needing somebody to leave the field, and note the species and approximate age so the correct handling and any sampling requirement is set up before the vehicle arrives. Call 01704 776977 to book a collection, or use contact us if you would rather set up a scheduled arrangement for the rest of the season.
