Home Defence and the Farmer |
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If this country were to be attacked with nuclear weapons, many farms would be damaged or set on fire, even though they might be well away from where the explosions occurred. In addition, there would be a grave risk that highly dangerous radioactive dust (or fall-out) resulting from the explosions would be spread over wide areas of the countryside. |
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Knowledge about the effect of fall-out on farms is still incomplete; in fact, the effect might differ to some extent from bomb to bomb, depending on the kind of soil over which the bomb burst, on the weather at the time of explosion and on other factors. | ||||
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![]() The continuance of food production on farms affected by fallout could well depend upon the practical steps taken by each farmer and his staff at a time when they would be on their own, with no one to turn to for advice or help. The handbook can only suggest in general terms how livestock and crops could be safeguarded. If an attack came, farmers in all parts of the United Kingdom would suddenly be faced with new and major problems. On their solution, our survival might well depend. Although mainly concerned with farming
matters, the handbook also deals briefly with the danger
to the farmer and his family from radioactive fall-out
and how they might protect themselves. There is much more
information on these non-farming aspects of civil defence
in the Home Office publications The Hydrogen Bomb and
Nuclear Weapons.
These handbooks do not
deal with all the difficulties that would face farmers if
this country were to be attacked with hydrogen bombs. In
addition to the fires, destruction and fall-out, there
would certainly be serious shortages of farming
requisites and difficulties in moving farm produce. The handbook also does not deal, except in passing, with the Government's plans for dealing with the consequences of radioactive fall-out on farms; for example, measures to deal with the large numbers of livestock that may sicken or die as a result of radiation; plans to control the movement of farm produce which may be dangerous through contamination by radioactive material. These, and other defence plans affecting farming, are being worked out on the basis of facts such as are presented in the following pages. It is important that a clear distinction should be made between fall-out which would arise if this country were attacked with nuclear weapons and fall-out resulting from the peace time testing of such weapons. Deposits of radioactive fall-out in peace time, although measurable, are both infinitesimal and negligible in comparison with what might be expected in war time, and it is accordingly emphasised that this handbook deals only with problems associated with the war time hazard. The same problems do not arise in peace time. Dangers from atomic or hydrogen
bombs Radioactive fall-out In the case of an attack with hydrogen bombs, the fall-out might spread over a very large area, stretching for hundreds of miles downwind from where the bomb bunt. Usually you would not be able to see this fine radioactive dust, even though it was falling on to your house, your buildings, your fields and your animals. Neither could you hear, feel or smell fall-out. Nevertheless, the dangerous radiations would still be there and they could be detected on special instruments. But if you did see a dust cloud after a bomb had gone off, you should take shelter at once. Fall-out is dangerous It is also dangerous to swallow fall-out in food or water. This is because once fall-out gets into your body, some of it will stay there; all the time it is there its rays are attacking the sensitive internal organs of the body and illness or death may result. Danger to animals Danger to milk supplies Other effects of fall-out on farming People in the less badly affected areas would still have to stay in refuge for forty-eight hours and, after that, would not be allowed out for more than an hour or two a day for the next few weeks. |
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TYPICAL FALL-OUT PATTERN This diagram illustrates the fall-out pattern from an H-bomb supposedly dropped on the north-west coast, with the wind blowing from a generally westerly direction. |
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In the lightly contaminated areas, people would be allowed greater freedom after the first forty-eight hours but should not spend more time in the open than was thought by their wardens to be safe. In some districts losses of livestock would be serious; sowing of crops might be delayed and some time might have to elapse before harvesting could take place. The growth of crops would not be greatly affected in most of the fall-out areas, though the fall-out on them might make them unfit for consumption by humans or animals. It might be necessary to suspend marketing crops for the time being until they had been tested for radioactivity and found to be safe. The Agricultural Departments are training some of their staffs to be able to carry out this testing. Fall-out warning People who saw the mushroom-shaped cloud would do well to make ready to shelter in case fall-out followed in their area. Plans are being made to give the public warning of the approach of fall-out. What protection is there against
fall-out?
What do these facts mean in working out how to protect yourself against fall-out? First of all, if you were in a fall-out district, you would have to stay indoors until told by a civil defence warden, or the radio, that it was safe to come out. Shelter in the cellar if you have one or, failing that, in a protected room on the ground floor of your house. Secondly, if you and your family were in a shelter with walls giving the equivalent protection of concrete a foot thick and which was such that the fall-out on the ground outside and on the roof was nowhere nearer to you than about 12 feet, the radiation received in the shelter would be only one-thirtieth of that outside in the open. Moreover, by staying inside for the first two days, you would have been having this thirtyfold protection during the time the fall-out was most dangerous. The radiation after two days would be only one-hundredth as dangerous as it had been just after the explosion. There are two other rules to observe about protection. The first is to keep fall-out off your skin and clothes. When it is on or near your body, it can cause serious burns. So if you believed you had fall-out on your clothes or body, you should change into other clothes at once and wash very thoroughly. The other, and most important, rule is to avoid getting fall-out inside your body, whether through a cut or on food or in water. Once it is inside your body, the radiations can do very great damage to the internal organs and bones. These rules, and the advice about sheltering in the most substantial building available, can be used to work out measures for protecting your livestock as well as your family. Even when you were told it was safe to come out of shelter, it might still not be safe to stay out of doors very long. Your warden would tell you whether you could get on with your work without further risk from radiation or whether your farm was in an area where the fall-out had been very heavy and where it would be necessary either for you to leave your farm for a time or, for your own safety, not to spend more than a few hours a day in the open for the time being. Although fall-out would be very dangerous, there are some useful precautions you could take to protect your family and your farm. Not all farms would be affected, but it is worth while taking these precautions because if hydrogen bombs were to explode in this country a very large number of farms would be affected to a greater or less extent and yours might be one of them. Moreover, many of the measures that would reduce the risk from fall-out are also good farming practice in peace time and worth adopting purely for their peace time value. For example, in peace time, well-managed pasture or fodder crops lead to lower production costs; in war time, livestock would come to less harm from fall-out in grazing a thick quick-growing pasture or fodder crop than if they were on a poor pasture where they had to graze a large area to get their food. The farmer with ample silage and hay would be able to feed it to his dairy cattle and avoid or delay putting them out on to contaminated pasture. Even the layout of buildings, yards and roads would help, not only in peace time but in fall-out conditions in war time. A good layout would help the farmer and his men to reduce the time spent out of doors and so minimise the dose of radiation they might receive. So efficient farming is not only in the national interest and the farmer's interest in peace time, but it is a way of preparing for safer farming if another war should occur. If you had a few months' warning of
the possibility of war
These things would help to make your farm safer if fall-out should come: Work out in advance whether you have shelter for dairy cattle and other livestock; try housing them one day to see how long it would take. Remember that the fall-out might be so dangerous that you would have to stay indoors for two days after it came down. This means that you might not be able to get out to milk your cows and they might be in considerable pain by the time you could milk them again. Probably the best thing you could do would be to provide yourself, or one of your men, with a protected shelter (for example, a loose box protected by a thick layer of earth) in the cowshed and equip it with a bed. Whoever stayed in it could leave it for long enough to ease the cows if they were in pain, but milking should be left as late as possible in the two-day period to allow the intensity of radiation to die down before leaving the comparative safety of the shelter to work in the less well protected cowshed. If necessary the milk would have to be wasted. Arrange your farming so that essential things are near the house or near the livestock buildings. For example, a mains tap outside the buildings (or better still, inside them), might be very useful. Have your silage pits as near as possible to the buildings where your livestock would be sheltering from fall-out; the shorter your journey in the open, the less exposed to fall-out you would be. But in siting your haystacks, remember the risk of their being fired either by a bomb or through natural causes. Have a store of fodder always inside your buildings, and if the roofs are poor, have some tarpaulins ready to put over them. A wall of earth 3 or 4 feet high against the livestock buildings would add to the protection against radiation which the walls would give your livestock. For example, a potato clamp built against walls of a building would be useful protection. Store as much clean water as you can for your animals which are under cover. It must be near the buildings. If you have a well, see that it is kept clean and covered. Put some tubs and other containers beside your buildings and keep them covered. Fill them regularly with clean water. Get hurdles or fencing ready so that cattle could, if necessary after the attack, be confined to a small area of grazing. Make sure any seed or grain is in a weatherproof building into which fall-out would not penetrate, and that your windows, doors and roofs are in good repair or covered over. If you are short of shelter for your livestock and have a Dutch barn, build up bales of straw at the sides and ends. The straw would not stop the radiation from fall-out to any extent, but the makeshift walls would reduce the risk of fall-out dust getting on the coats of animals sheltering under the barn and would keep the fall-out at a distance from them. Try to have some satisfactory storage space for fuel (a fuel tank is a good investment in peace time), fertilisers, feeding-stuffs and seeds. If there were to be a few months' warning of a war it might be possible to arrange with the trades concerned to move supplies of these requisites on to farms. If a war threatened, the Government would supply you with more detailed advice about the farming problems you might have to face and what it would want you to grow. There might be time for you to adjust your farming programme accordingly. Warning, after an outbreak of war,
of the approach of fall-out THESE
ARE THE THINGS YOU MIGHT Livestock Do what you can to reduce the milk yield of your cows temporarily to ease their pain, in case you cannot get out to milk them for a day or two. Thus:
Other animals can have food and water if you have time to get any in, but give them as little as is necessary to keep them alive. You may need all the clean food you have for feeding dairy cattle if the fall-out comes. Fodder Water Implements and Machinery If there were to be an attack on this country with nuclear weapons, and you had had to shelter from fall-out, you would want to know, when you were told it was safe to leave shelter:
FOOD FOR YOUR FAMILY The food in your larder would be safe to eat, provided it was in sealed containers or otherwise protected so that no dust from outside could get on to the food. There would also probably be food on the farm which you would want to use if you knew it was safe to eat or knew how to make it safe. The following paragraphs give some advice on dealing with food produced on your farm.
But in the case of growing plants there would be the danger after the first few days that potatoes and other root crops, as well as peas and beans and the leaves of cabbages, might be contaminated by radioactive material which had been taken up through the root system from the soil (see Fall-out in the growing season). If the fallout came during the growing season it would be better to have the crops tested for radioactivity before eating them. But if food was so scarce that you had to eat growing plants which might be contaminated, it would be safer to use potatoes, then peas and beans, then green vegetables, in that order. REDUCING THE RISK FROM FALL-OUT There is no known way of preventing the fall-out from giving out its radiations, nor of speeding up the rate at which the intensity of the radiations dies away. All you can do is to move the fall-out to a place where it can do least harm. In the few hours each day when it would be safe to be out, your first job would be to see to your livestock. Then if you had plenty of water you could hose down the roofs and buildings, also any made-up surfaces or hard roadways there may be around your buildings. If you had little or no stored fodder, some nitrogen could be put on to a well-grazed pasture. It would speed up the growth of new grazing, which would be very much safer than the older grass that was there when the fall-out came down. Or you could mow some grass, cart it to a place where the animals could not get it and put some nitrogen on the field to encourage new growth. It would be useful to keep a set of old clothes and rubber boots for outdoor use and to change when you got back home. They should be left in the porch on going indoors. When working, outside gloves should be used, preferably rubber ones, but in any case it would be most important to wash your hands well before eating and to scrub your finger nails well. If you were doing a dusty job - ploughing or cultivating dry land, or threshing or grinding corn or stacking hay - a handkerchief or a simple dust filter should be worn over nose and mouth, and ears should be plugged with cotton wool. Afterwards the nose and ears should be thoroughly cleaned. Persisting dangers from fall-out One of these chemicals, called radioactive strontium, retains its radioactivity for many years. If it got into your body some of it would go into the bones and stay there, all the time giving out radiations which might eventually cause illness or premature death. That is why it is important for food to be tested for contamination before marketing. It is specially important that milk should be tested for radioactivity. This is because even though the amount of radioactive chemicals remaining in a fall-out area might be small enough to permit lifting any restrictions on the length of time people could be outside, dairy cattle on free grazing would collect these chemicals from all the grass they would be eating. In this way they might swallow dangerous amounts of the radioactive strontium, some of which would get into their milk. If your cows had been under shelter and had had food and water which had had no fall-out dust on it, their milk would almost certainly be safe. Even so, it would be better for it to be tested before it was supplied to the public.
WHAT ELSE TO DO ON YOUR FARM This handbook is intended to help you through the first few difficult days, or the week or two just after fall-out had come down. It does not deal with the longer-term problems such as how best to get a badly contaminated farm back into production again. This and other problems could best be tackled by advice on the spot in the circumstances of your farm. Agricultural and other Government Departments are making plans for you to be given advice and help locally on the problems that would face you if ever there should be another war. But in the short term, the advice in this handbook, and that of your warden, would help you in the very difficult conditions that would exist after an attack with nuclear weapons. As long as it was safe to be outside - and your warden would tell you about that - it would be safe for you to carry on farm operations and to harvest your crops. Priority would have to be given to producing uncontaminated milk; remember that a thick, quick-growing pasture would help to reduce the risk from fall-out to the grazing animal. The remainder of this handbook consists of information on practical questions which farmers are likely to ask about the threat from radioactive fall-out to particular farm enterprises in which they are interested. Though much of the information can be deduced from the facts about fall-out already given, the additional details will probably help farmers to make plans to tackle these entirely new problems, should they ever occur. If you want further advice, ask your local agricultural officer. If you are able to get your cows under cover, keep them there as long as possible, and preferably until you are advised that it is safe for them to go out to graze. If a shortage of feedingstuffs forces you to put out your cows earlier, it is better to put them on as small an area as possible, even though it would mean a ternporary loss of milk production, so as to reduce the amount of fall-out getting inside the animals and into their milk. Should cows be dried off rather than
continue in milk on a contaminated farm? Even if your cows had to be on contaminated pasture for a time, provided they did not take in sufficient fall-out to cause illness or death, they would still be able to give uncontaminated milk later on. Once they had got back on to an uncontaminated food supply, the amount of radioactive chemicals in their milk would be reduced each day until after a few weeks their milk should be fit for human consumption, though it would need testing first. Would contaminated milk make milking
machines unfit for use? Are them special precautions for
handling dairy cattle and other livestock exposed to fall-out? |
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What is radiation sickness? Radiation sickness is not infectious but it would reduce the resistance of the animal to other infection. If your livestock had received a heavy dose of radiation, whether entering their bodies from outside or because they had eaten feed contaminated with fall-out, they might sicken and die within a few weeks. Their flesh would be edible if they were killed before they became very sick. Even if they did not die as a result of the radiation, they would not make thrifty animals again and better use could be made of the feedingstuffs they would consume if they were allowed to live. In areas where the level of radioactivity made it likely that a high proportion of the cattle would suffer from radiation sickness, arrangements would be made for the slaughter of the cattle and suitable disposal of the bones and offal as soon as practicable and possibly before any signs of radiation sickness had become apparent. You would be told if such arrangements were being made in your area and be given full instructions. It would in fact be better not to slaughter until you had had some official advice, as it would be easier to preserve meat on the hoof than on the hook in the early days of a war of this nature and to keep animals alive would help the Government to organise a fair meat distribution. How would you know if livestock had
radiation sickness ? Would poultry, pigs and sheep be
affected by fall-out to the same extent as cattle? Is there any treatment for radiation
sickness? How long would it be before it would
be safe to use milk and eggs from cows and poultry that
had eaten feed contaminated with fall-out? If you could not send eggs to a packing station it would be best to put them into waterglass and store them until they had been tested. The risk of dangerous contamination in an egg, is, however, very small. They could be used if urgently needed for food. Has fall-out any effects on breeding? With heavily contaminated female stock, some may become permanently sterile, others will remain fertile but with a chance that in some future generation, probably beyond our life-time, abnormal offspring may result. For breeding, then, the best course would be:
You would be unlikely to see many ill-effects if you were to breed from contaminated stock. It would be better to use your bull than not to get your cow in calf, as the country would need all the milk your farm could produce. Would fall-out affect hatching eggs? In most areas the radiation from fall-out would not materially affect the growth of crops or damage seeds or young plants, but the crops might not be fit for human or animal consumption when harvested. Produce (except eggs, if needed) should not be marketed until tested for radioactivity. If it were safe to be outside, it would be safe to prepare the ground for your crops, to sow seed or to plant out or to harvest crops, provided you took the precautions about washing. Also, if your crop was not planted when the fall-out came, it would be advisable to plough in the top soil so as to bury the fall-out as deeply as possible before planting. If you had a dusty job to do, and there are many on the farm, you should remember to wear a dust mask and to wash thoroughly afterwards. Grain, potatoes or other roots stored in weatherproof buildings would be safe to eat. Roots in clamps would be safe to eat if after removal from the clamp all the soil were washed from them. Grain in stack would also be safe to use if several layers of sheaves from the roof were discarded and the outsides of the stack pared. Fall-out in
the growing season Fall-out just before harvest time Harvesting It would be best to harvest a contaminated cereal crop with a combine, since this would be a less dusty job than handling sheaves. Whatever method you used you should take the precautions for your own safety described in the section Reducing the Risk from Fall-out. Sometimes a crop might be saved for food, even if it seemed to be badly contaminated. Thus contaminated cereal crops might at least be partly decontaminated in the threshing process, which would remove the chaff, the part on which the fall-out had fallen. If there was a grave shortage of food in your district and your cereals had to be harvested to give an immediate emergency supply of flour, even though it was known they might be slightly contaminated, threshing would help to make the crop safer. Potatoes Are there any genetic effects on
seed exposed to fall-out? Would it be safe to plant by hand in
contaminated soil? Would the use of sprayers help to
remove the fall-out from the top soil? Should crops growing in contaminated
land be limed and fertilised? Your warden would tell you how long you and your men could safely stay outdoors. Do not exceed this time - use it for essential outdoor work. During the periods each day when you had to stay indoors, it would be almost as safe to work in your outbuildings provided they are at least as big and well constructed as a house. Buildings with asbestos, wood or corrugated iron sides would not give much protection against radiation from fall-out, and any time spent in them would have to be counted as part of your outdoor time. The higher the building the better; a high roof keeps the fall-out further away from you. See that your men know about wearing dust masks, gloves, changing their clothes and washing after being out of doors. These simple precautions would reduce the risk appreciably. After dusty work or handling livestock it would also help if your men could change at the farm and travel home in clean clothes or at least change as soon as they reached home. Arrange your work so that your men have as little travelling to do as possible. The time they take to get from their homes to your farm counts against the time they could spend in the open. The single men might be willing to live in the farmhouse for a week or two to reduce their travelling time and so be able to spend longer on essential jobs. A shift system to reduce travelling time might be feasible. Is it necessary to change the
cropping rotation because of fall-out? Arrangements the Government is
making to advise you about your farming Published by Her Majestey's Stationary
Office Printed in Great Britain under the
authority of Her Majesty's Stationary Office Wt. 3692 PRICE ONE SHILLING NET First published 1958: Reprinted 1959
This document is believed to be in
the public domain and was transferred to the Internet by
George Coney. |