Contract rearing, share farming and grazing agreements have grown steadily across the North West, and they solve a real problem for both parties. They also create a question about responsibility that most agreements handle poorly. Martlands provides licensed fallen stock and ABP collection from a DEFRA approved facility at Burscough, and contract rearing fallen stock collection is a subject we are asked about far more often than the number of words devoted to it in the average agreement would suggest. The regulatory answer is clearer than most people expect.
Ownership and Keepership Are Not the Same Thing
This is the point everything else turns on. Under the Animal By-Products (Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2013 the duty to arrange collection of fallen stock attaches to the person who has the animal, not to the person who owns it. In a contract rearing arrangement the heifers on the rearer’s holding belong to the owner, but the rearer is the keeper and it is the rearer who carries the duty of care when one of them dies.
That surprises people, and it occasionally causes friction, because the owner is generally the party with the financial interest in the animal and the rearer is the party legally obliged to sort out the disposal. It is nonetheless the position, and an agreement that says otherwise does not change it. What an agreement can and should do is settle who pays and who does the administration, which is a private matter between the parties.
What a Well-Drafted Agreement Says
A good contract rearing agreement addresses fallen stock explicitly in four respects. It states that the rearer will arrange collection promptly through a licensed collector, which reflects the legal position. It states who bears the cost. It states how and when the owner is to be notified of a death, which usually matters more to the owner than the cost does. And it states what evidence is to be provided, which in practice means the Commercial Document and the ear tag number.
That last point avoids the most common dispute we hear about, which is an owner querying, weeks later, whether an animal died at all. A Commercial Document naming the species, date and collection point, sitting alongside a recorded tag number, closes that question immediately. It is a five-second job at the time and it is worth doing on every animal.
Notification and the Twenty-Four Hour Clock
Some agreements require the rearer to notify the owner before disposing of an animal, and occasionally require the owner’s agreement. That is understandable but it needs a time limit written into it, because the twenty-four hour collection duty does not pause while a message goes unanswered. The workable version is that the rearer notifies the owner and books the collection at the same time, with the owner having the opportunity to request a veterinary examination if they want one and to pay for it.
Where the owner does want a post-mortem examination, that is entirely compatible with prompt collection provided it is arranged quickly. Tell us when you book, and our farm and fallen stock collection will work around the veterinary attendance rather than cutting across it.
Mixed Holdings and Multiple Owners
A rearer taking stock from several owners has a more complicated record-keeping job than one running their own herd, because every collection needs to be attributable to the right animal and therefore the right owner. Keep a simple running record linking tag numbers to collection references rather than relying on the Commercial Documents alone, since a single collection may take animals belonging to two different owners.
Holdings running several enterprises alongside each other face a related challenge in keeping by-product categories separate, which we have covered in our guidance on mixed livestock farms managing multiple ABP categories. The principle is the same in both cases, which is that the record has to be made at the point of collection because it cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
Assurance Sits With the Holding
Where the rearing holding is assured, the assessment covers the fallen stock arrangements on that holding regardless of who owns the animals. An owner cannot rely on their own scheme membership to cover a rearer’s holding, and a rearer cannot point at the owner when asked for collection records. Each party needs its own documentation, and both should hold copies where the arrangement is significant.
The broader legal framework governing all of this, including the categorisation rules and the position on burial and burning, is set out in our overview of fallen stock and the law. Cattle that die on the holding are Category 1 material and go through our Category 1 ABP collection route, with BSE testing carried out here as a DEFRA approved sampling facility for fallen cattle over forty-eight months.
Where These Arrangements Concentrate
Contract rearing is heavily used by dairy herds that have expanded beyond the ground they own, and the rearing capacity tends to sit on grassland holdings a little away from the main dairy areas. Across Merseyside fallen stock collection the pattern is grassland units taking youngstock from herds further inland, on ground where arable and horticulture would otherwise dominate.
The coastal strip around Southport fallen stock collection and the mosslands behind it carries a good deal of this work, and it sits within a few miles of our Burscough base, which makes same-day collection routine rather than exceptional.
Getting the Arrangement Right
If you are drafting or renewing an agreement, settle the fallen stock clause properly rather than borrowing a sentence from a template. Call 01704 776977 if you want to understand exactly what documentation a collection would generate for each party, or get in touch through contact us.
