Autumn calving concentrates a herd’s highest-risk animals into a few intense weeks, and the resulting mortality is the single largest fallen stock workload many dairy and suckler units generate all year. Martlands provides DEFRA approved fallen stock and ABP collection to herds across Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Cumbria, and calf mortality fallen stock collection during a tight autumn block calls for a different arrangement to the occasional one-off collection. Small carcasses, frequent losses and a compliance record that has to hold up months later all point towards a scheduled approach rather than an ad hoc one.
The Shape of Autumn Calving Losses
Losses in a calving block are not evenly spread. Stillbirths and deaths within the first twenty-four hours account for a substantial share, and they arrive in step with the calving pattern itself, which means the busiest week for calving is also the busiest week for collections. A second, later cluster follows in calves between two and six weeks old, driven principally by scour and by respiratory disease as calves are grouped. On a hundred-cow autumn block those two clusters can sit six weeks apart, and planning for only the first of them leaves a holding scrambling in November.
The practical consequence is that carcasses accumulate. A stillborn calf is small enough that it does not feel urgent in the way a fallen cow does, and it is easily left in a corner of the calving shed while the next cow is calving. That instinct is the root of most of the compliance failures we see on calving units, and it is worth resisting deliberately.
The Legal Position Does Not Scale With the Animal
The Animal By-Products (Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2013 make no distinction based on the size or age of the animal. A stillborn calf is fallen stock, it must be collected within twenty-four hours of discovery, and it must go through an approved route. On-farm burial and burning have been illegal in the UK since 2003 with only very limited exceptions for genuinely remote areas, and no part of the North West dairy belt falls within them. Burying a dead calf in a field corner is not a grey area, and it is one of the more commonly detected breaches precisely because it is easy to see once somebody looks.
Bovines that die on the holding are handled as Category 1 material. Our Category 1 ABP collection operates under Animal By-Products Licence No APB/CCN21/373/8002 with Waste Carrier Licence CB/QE5406MT and Site Licence EAWML/100236, and every collection produces a Commercial Document recording what was taken, from where and when.
Where BSE Sampling Comes Into an Autumn Block
Calves themselves do not require BSE testing, but the calving period reliably produces losses among the adult herd as well. Cows lost to calving difficulty, metabolic disease around calving, or complications in the days that follow are frequently well over forty-eight months of age, and fallen cattle above that age require BSE testing. Martlands is a DEFRA approved processing and sampling facility, which means a fallen cow collected from your yard is sampled within the same licensed operation that removed it, with no second handover in the chain. Our explanation of BSE testing of fallen cattle sets out how the process works and what the farm’s part in it actually is.
Tell us the animal’s age when you book. It is a small thing, but it lets the sampling requirement be set up before the vehicle arrives rather than discovered at the yard gate, and it keeps the collection moving.
Storage on a Calving Unit
Calving sheds are the worst possible place to hold a carcass. They contain the most immunologically vulnerable animals on the holding, they are warm, and they concentrate exactly the pathogens that cause neonatal losses in the first place. Set up a covered, hard-standing collection point outside the calving accommodation, away from watercourses and away from any route that calf feeding equipment travels along. Where the loss is scour-related, treat the carcass as infectious material and handle it accordingly, with dedicated equipment or thorough cleaning between uses.
The other reason to move carcasses out promptly is vermin. Rats and foxes are drawn to a calving yard in autumn regardless, and a small carcass gives them a reason to stay. That is a straightforward disease-transmission route into a shed of week-old calves.
Scheduled Collections Beat Emergency Calls
For a holding running a genuine block, a scheduled collection arrangement across the calving period is nearly always the better answer. It removes the daily decision about whether today’s loss justifies a call, it keeps every animal well within the twenty-four hour window, and it produces a clean and continuous documentary record across the exact period an assessor is most likely to examine. Our farm and fallen stock collection can be set up on that basis, with bookings and references managed through the KoLeCt system, and same-day collection remains available for anything that cannot wait for the next scheduled visit.
The wider practicalities of running collection alongside a milking herd, including how to fit collections around parlour times and how the documentation supports Red Tractor, are covered in our guide to fallen stock collection for dairy farms.
The Cheshire and South Lancashire Calving Belt
Autumn block calving is heavily concentrated in the Cheshire dairy country and the lowland Lancashire units south of the Ribble. The ground carries cows late, the forage base supports an autumn block well, and herd sizes are large enough that a block produces meaningful weekly volumes. Around Sandbach fallen stock collection and the Dane valley, the density of dairy units means our vehicles are in the area most days through the autumn, which is what makes a scheduled arrangement genuinely practical rather than a promise on paper.
The same is true east towards Congleton fallen stock collection and the ground rising towards the Staffordshire moorlands, where herds are typically smaller but sit on routes we already run. Distance from Burscough is far less relevant to response time than whether a holding sits on an existing round, and across the Cheshire plain almost all of them do.
Recording It Properly
Keep the Commercial Documents together with your calving records rather than in a separate file. Assurance assessors, DEFRA audits and local authority inspections all work from the same principle, which is that the paperwork should let somebody reconstruct what happened without asking you. A block calving period with a full set of collection documents and no gaps is one of the easiest parts of an assessment to pass, and one of the hardest to reconstruct after the fact if the documents were never filed.
To book a collection or set up a scheduled arrangement for your autumn block, call 01704 776977. If you would prefer to discuss volumes and timings before the block starts, get in touch through contact us and we will plan the round with you.
