Our great-grandparents would not be surprised by the measures being used to contain the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Burning cattle and imprisoning farmers within their holdings as means of limiting infection are actions more in keeping with plague-stricken 16th-century Europe.
What is different about this rural crisis, however, at least from an Irish perspective, is the impetus it has given to the use of Internet technologies within the farming community.
Since foot-and-mouth disease was diagnosed in Co Louth on March 22nd, farms in the Republic have become virtual fortresses, with movements in and out kept to a minimum. As a result of the limitations such restrictions have placed on face-to-face contact, farmers and the organisations they depend upon are turning to technologies that have not been seen before in Irish agriculture.
The Internet is something that has come late to the farming community. With the exception of the site of the Irish Farmers Journal, www.farmersjournal.ie, no big farming organisation had a Web presence up to a year ago. Teagasc, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority, took down its original site, only reinstituting it last year, while neither of the two main farming unions had any Web presence up to six months ago.
When sites started to make an appearance, interest in them was less than flattering. The Irish Farmers' Association, the largest such union in the Republic, could manage only 200 hits a month on its site, www.ifa.ie, up to February.
WITH the onset of foot-and-mouth disease, however, interest in the site has rocketed, with more than 7,000 hits between February and March. In the same period www.irlgov.ie/daff, the Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development site, registered an impressive 3.8 million visits.
Brian Morrisey, Web manager with the Irish Farmers Journal, is sceptical of the use of hit counts as indicators of Internet usage, but believes that farmers as a group have the potential to become some of the most efficient users of Internet technologies.
"Farmers were one of the first groups to embrace mobiles. When you offer them a good idea they are interested in it, and if it meets their needs they will buy it, even faster than the general public, because they are used to having to invest."
In the present crisis, most users will have logged on to www.irlgov.ie/daff. With its special foot-and-mouth section, the site provides good-quality content on Government guidelines and restrictions. For first-time users especially, however, navigation is confusing and the site's appearance is dull.
TEAGASC is credited with having the best agricultural website in the Republic. Apart from giving daily updates, it describes the symptoms of the virus using graphics and text.
Its only shortcoming, in common with all Irish agriculture-related sites, is that it doesn't provide a forum where users can discuss the disease.
The IFA website and that of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, www.icmsa.ie, also provide extensive coverage, with regular updates. In the case of the IFA site, the coverage even informs farmers that "apart from cloven-hoofed animals, elephants are also susceptible" to foot-and-mouth disease.
The site with the greatest international acclaim is that of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in Britain, www.maff.gov.uk. With hourly updates and more than 65 links, it chronicles the daily spread of the virus.
Evidence of the bleak consequences of that spread is provided behind links such as "List of Infected Premises", "Infected Areas" and "Moving Livestock to Slaughter".
Once foot-and-mouth disease has passed, farmers will want to put these accounts of destruction behind them. Being a practical bunch, however, they are unlikely to forget the benefits of a technology that has provided them with almost unlimited information in combating the epidemic.