Autumn is the point in the farming year when liver fluke stops being a background worry and starts killing animals, and liver fluke fallen stock collection becomes a real operational requirement on wet ground across Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria. Martlands is a family-run, DEFRA approved business based in Burscough, and our fallen stock and ABP collection service covers the low-lying mosslands, the Ribble and Lune floodplains and the rush-infested in-bye ground where the mud snail that carries the parasite thrives. When acute fasciolosis takes sheep in September and October, losses arrive in groups rather than singly, and the disposal side needs to be arranged as quickly as the veterinary side.
This article sets out what an autumn fluke challenge looks like in practice on North West holdings, what the law requires you to do with the animals you lose, and how to keep the paperwork straight when several carcasses leave the farm at once.
Why Autumn Is the Dangerous Part of the Fluke Year
The parasite’s life cycle runs through an intermediate host, the mud snail, which needs standing water and warmth to multiply. A wet summer followed by a mild September produces a heavy burden of infective cysts on pasture in the early autumn, and grazing sheep pick up very large numbers over a short period. Acute fasciolosis follows, in which immature flukes migrate through the liver in sufficient numbers to cause fatal haemorrhage. The classic presentation on a Lancashire hill farm is not a sick ewe but a dead one, in good bodily condition, found within a few days of moving onto wetter ground.
Cattle rarely die acutely but suffer chronic disease, condition loss and secondary infection, and autumn is when black disease, caused by clostridial organisms activated by migrating flukes, claims animals without warning. Both patterns produce the same problem for the farm office. Deaths cluster, they arrive at the busiest time of the housing year, and each one carries a legal disposal duty.
The Legal Position on Every Animal You Lose
On-farm burial and burning of livestock has been illegal in the United Kingdom since 2003, with very limited exceptions for genuinely remote areas that do not apply to farms served from Burscough. Under the Animal By-Products (Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2013 you have a duty of care to ensure fallen stock is collected within twenty-four hours of discovery. That clock runs from the point you find the animal, not from the point you get round to reporting it, which matters when a shepherd walking wet ground finds three ewes on a Sunday.
Fallen cattle and sheep are handled as Category 1 material because of the specified risk material and transmissible spongiform encephalopathy controls attached to ruminants. Our Category 1 ABP collection operation is licensed for exactly this material under Animal By-Products Licence No APB/CCN21/373/8002, and our site holds Waste Carrier Licence CB/QE5406MT and Site Licence EAWML/100236. Any fallen bovine over forty-eight months of age must also be sampled for BSE, and because Martlands is a DEFRA approved processing and sampling facility that testing happens as part of the collection rather than as a separate arrangement you have to chase. The background to that requirement is set out in our guidance on BSE testing of fallen cattle.
Multiple Losses and the Documentation That Follows Them
A single ewe and a group of eight are not the same administrative event. Every collection generates a Commercial Document recording the category of material, the number and species of animals, the date, the collecting vehicle and the receiving premises. Where several animals are collected together, that document is the evidence that all of them left the holding through a licensed route on the same day. Farm assurance inspectors read those documents against your medicine and mortality records, and an unexplained gap between the two is exactly the discrepancy a Red Tractor assessor is trained to notice.
Our bookings run through the KoLeCt system, which timestamps the request and holds the collection history against your holding number. That record is what allows you to demonstrate, months later, that the deaths you recorded during an October fluke outbreak were reported and removed inside the statutory window. Keeping the mortality figure and the collection record aligned is far easier if the animals are booked as they are found rather than gathered into a weekly total.
Fluke Country and Collection Geography
The heaviest fluke ground in our service area is not evenly distributed. The mosslands north of Burscough, the wet flushes on the Bowland fringe, the Lune and Wyre valleys and the marginal grazing along the Solway edge all carry snail habitat that drier eastern counties do not. Farms around Garstang sit on some of the most consistently affected land in the county, and our Garstang fallen stock collection route is planned around that. The same applies across the wider Lancashire fallen stock collection area and northward into Cumbria fallen stock collection, where fell farms combine high snail habitat with the longest travel distances.
Proximity to the M6, M61 and M58 corridors is what makes same-day response realistic across that spread of ground. A farm on the Fylde and a farm in the Eden Valley are very different propositions for a collection vehicle, and knowing which routes are running on a given day is how we hold the twenty-four hour window in practice rather than in principle.
Storage Between Discovery and Collection
Where an animal cannot be collected immediately, it must be held in a way that prevents access by scavengers, birds and other livestock, and prevents run-off into watercourses. On wet autumn ground that last point matters more than it does in summer, because a carcass left on a field margin above a ditch is a pollution incident waiting to be recorded. A hard-standing collection point with a cover, sited where a vehicle can reach it without crossing soft ground, resolves the problem for the whole housing period rather than one animal at a time.
Getting the Autumn Onto a Routine
Farms that handle a fluke autumn well treat disposal as part of the parasite control plan rather than as a reaction to it. If you are dosing strategically and expect losses in the fortnight after a heavy challenge, tell us. Our farm and fallen stock collection service can hold a scheduled route through the period so that collections are predictable rather than negotiated each time. Same-day collection remains available for the animals that cannot wait.
To arrange collection or to set up a routine for the autumn, call 01704 776977 or use the contact us page. As NFSCO members we can also handle collections placed through the national scheme, and every removal leaves you with the documentation an inspector will ask for.
