The outbreak of sheep pox in the highland plateau of Granada lasted 121 days and caused 4,234 head of goat and sheep to be put down.

Yes, Baza and Huéscar have come out the other side of a disaster that started in September, and yes, sheep pox had supposedly been eradicated in Spain in 1968, but now picking up the bits and pieces and getting the herds back up to size is the task at hand.

For some sheep and/or goat farmers, there is nothing to pick up because 13 of them have gone under. During those long four months; some because of the economic burden of feeding their animals with dry feed because it was forbidden for them to graze, and others because they simply lost all of their livestock.

A total of 210 livestock farmers remain in that area who are desperate to receive compensation from the Junta, because they did what they were told to, to the letter.

The Director General of Producción Agrícola y Ganadera belonging to the Junta de Andalucía, Manuel Gómez Galera, recognises the difficult decisions that farmers were forced to take and said that the compensation was in the pipeline: they are going to pay out 219,000 euros to the owners of the 92,000 animales that were put down. There will also be money for farmers who had to rely on dry-feed whilst their flocks were locked in.

“The budget amounts to 700,000 euros in grants whereas we calculate that farmers have had to find 1.5m in extra costs in dry feed,” explained the Chairman of the Asociación de Defensa Sanitaria Ganadera, José Antonio Puntas. This association is fighting to obtain more funding from the Junta.

He points out that veterinary experts working for the Junta consider that the outbreak was contained and eliminated in record time, meaning that farmers did all that was required of them, therefore compensation should be “sufficient.”

However, although the outbreak has been dealt with in Granada, there has been an outbreak in Cuenca (Castilla-La Mancha) where over 30,000 animals have been put down and restrictive measures are in place.

Finally, the Director General of Animal Health belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture, Valentín Almansa, has congratulated Granada for how well it coped, explaining that farmers even refrained from going to the village bars for fear of spreading the disease with contaminated clothing.

(News: Baza & Huescar, Altiplano, Granada, Andalucia)