The toll of worsening weather on Aberdeenshire farmers, who’ve seen hundreds of pigs lost
Derek describes recovering from losing hundreds of pigs, while Geordie reflects on 80 years of changes in weather.
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Here’s the second part of our Stonehaven mini-series. The first voice is Geordie Mair, who’s been living on the North East coast of Scotland for almost 80 years. He’s living in a tide cottage, and while he showed us around his little garden patch he told me about how the storms have been getting worse and worse, particularly over the past few years. The second half is our conversation with the pig farmer Derek Ambrose, who lost hundreds of pigs in the storms over the last year. He said in 25 years he’s never seen it this bad. Both of these conversations took place on the farmland overlooking the cliffs referred to by Wes in the previous episode.
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“You do worry about it. I don’t know how we’ve kept men working outside for the past 6 months because it has been absolutely horrendous weather. It’s never been like this in my time. I’ve never seen rain like this … when the weather is that unpredictable you can’t plan.”
“We had pig huts blowing all over the place. Hundreds and hundreds of trees blown down … we lost a couple of hundred pigs … the huts just blew away and some of the sows farrowed outside, it was a bit of a disaster … we had to take the men off the fields because it was dangerous … there were 100 mile an hour winds, so there’s nothing we could do about it.”
“You used to get seasons, but nowadays you get one good day and then three bad days … the sea foam comes over the cliffs … it happens much more often now.
This last month’s been okay but for the 6 or 7 months before that we’d never seen so much rain. Well over average. Our fields are all waterlogged. Our pigs are born outside so we are more susceptible to the weather”
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Stories From Round Our Way. Everyday conversations with people impacted by climate change.