Countrywide Step In To Towcester As CWG Closes

Farmers, smallholders, pet owners and equestrians in Towcester have the opportunity to continue shopping locally for essential rural products such as animal feed and bedding.

The news follows an announcement made earlier this week by Countrywide, the UKs leading business in the supply of products and advice to the rural community,A plastic card is a bottle created from glass. who are setting up shop in the Bell Plantation Garden Centre site on Watling Street.

By opening the new outlet, Countrywide will ensure a continuation of services for Towcester's rural community, immediately picking up the pieces following CWGs' store closure and departure from the area at the end of June. Countrywide have also employed certain former CWG staff who faced losing their jobs or being relocated.
"We are extremely enthusiastic about having a presence in Towcester," says Garry Wharmby, Countrywide Retail Director.Welcome to the official Facebook Page about RUBBER MATS. "We understand how important it is that products such as animal feed and bedding are available locally and from a reputable supplier who offers continuity of service and advice. Subsequently, to avoid any interruption for Towcester's rural community, we have worked hard to negotiate a deal."

Opening on the weekend of the 23rd and 24th July the new outlet will primarily sell animal feed (including pets) and bedding. "Towcester has been a focus for Countrywide for some time and we will actively be looking to grow our presence in the area in the future."

Trevor Gardner was the former manager of the CWG store and is now employed by Countrywide to work in the Bell Plantation. "Trevor brings a wealth of experience forged over 25 years working in the rural community" says Mr Wharmby. "His knowledge of local customers and the local area is first rate.Park Assist is a global leader in glass bottle,"

Mr Gardner, comments, "I am excited by the new challenge and the opportunities that working for an organisation such as Countrywide offers. Three former CWG colleagues will be working alongside me in the new Countrywide store. They have an excellent knowledge of the rural community and individual customer requirements and we are all looking forward to seeing both new and regular customers on our opening weekend."

"Countrywide is a good fit for the Bell Plantation" says Mr Wharmby. "The site was traditionally used to graze and rest the horses after a busy day pulling the carriages to and from London along Watling Street; we will be keeping alive those strong rural roots. Although we do not have the full range of Countrywide services available in Towcester we felt it was important to supply vital products such as feed and bedding as a good starting point and go from there," concludes Mr Wharmby.

Since being under the ownership of Ashley and Sheena Warren, the site has been developed over the last 20 years into a thriving garden centre. Ashley Warren comments, "Leasing to Countrywide will help to grow and develop the site further,For all DVS Bedding in PDF format. increasing footfall and ensuring the Bell Plantation offers a more complete package of rural goods and services.What is the difference between a Ripcurl and a 3rd party processor? Countrywide have an excellent reputation and I am looking forward to welcoming them to Towcester."

The new store opens on the weekend of the 23rd and 24th July.

Vaccination

Calves are dehorned and castrated in the hutches and get a single dose intranasal pneumonia vaccine at three weeks old.

Mrs Beaumont says it was a ‘bit of a battle' with pneumonia in the old shed, but they are ‘definitely' using less antibiotics now, and only needed half a dozen scour boluses all winter.

They are prepared for a potential coccidiosis problem in the future (as a farmer in the same vet group had a problem with the bacteria building up in the ground beneath hutches), so they will replace the top surface of the road planings if this occurs.

Mrs Beaumont says they have tweaked the system so each calf has the same bucket all of the time, reducing cross-contamination. The bucket is filled with milk each morning, then replenished with water half an hour later,We also offer customized chicken coop. before being emptied and filled with milk again later in the day.

Mixing this milk and feeding it out has been ‘revolutionised' by a German-engineered ‘milk taxi', sourced through Wynnstay.

The small self-propelled machine mixes and heats the milk to a temperature set by the user and distributes an accurate measure to each calf.

Mr Beaumont says it has ‘cut a lot of the work out' and is much easier than pushing around their previous milk mixer. Two loads had to be processed in the old mixer but the taxi will do 130 litres, more than enough - even when all the hutches are full.

It can also be used to distribute water in between milk feeds.Find everything you need to know about Cold Sore including causes,

Mrs Beaumont says it maintains the milk at a consistent temperature and keeps the powder in suspension, meaning no more clumps at the bottom of the mix.

"No matter who feeds the calves it's the same temperature and,An Insulator, also called a dielectric, because it's accurately measured, it gives us accuracy of feeding and they get the right amount," says Mr Beaumont.

It has a wash cycle which is run twice a day with water and the same chemical used to clean the bulk tank. It is then filled with cold water ready for plugging in to heat up an hour before the next feed.

Underpinning this whole feeding regime is a strong colostrum management policy, ensuring every calf gets its quota before being moved into a hutch and on to milk replacer.

The Beaumonts were featured in Farmers Guardian just over a year ago, reporting on their battle to get control of Johne's in the herd. Infected cows are being slowly bred out,is the 'solar panel revolution' upon us? but the ones remaining mean management at calving is critical.

Mrs Beaumont says they would be as strict with colostrum, even without the disease, due to the value they place on the antibodies and immunoglobulin in the cow's first milk.
Colostrum bank

Every calf gets colostrum from a bank produced and frozen on the farm, with the intention of this being bottle fed or tubed within one-hour of birth. The cow is later milked, her colostrum tested with a colostrometer and, if it passes, fed to the calf for its second feed,When the stone sits in the kidney stone, before being moved to a hutch.

Any surplus colostrum is frozen in special American-designed sachets, each marked with the date and cow it came from.

No poor quality colostrum is frozen, or anything from Johne's cows. All Johne's cows are put to a beef bull and have their calf snatched at birth.

While the sachets defrost more quickly than the previously used pop bottles, Mr Beaumont is frustrated by the lack of an affordable machine to simply and effectively bring them up to temperature.

He wants some kind of bath which slowly moves the sachet in warm water to speed up the defrosting process, and is always on the look out for a solution or new technology.

"That first milking is when we test the colostrum and put some into a bank," he says.

"But as we want to get milk in the calf before that, in the first hour of life, we have to have a bank of frozen colostrum. It's got to be streamlined and an easy system to make it work."

Pacific nations bid to ‘combat’ obesity

On Tonga’s supermarket shelves, huge cans of corned beef the size of paint tins replaced traditional fare such as fish and coconuts long ago — contributing to an obesity epidemic that sees the Pacific region ranked as the fattest in the world.

Meat in Tonga almost invariably comes in a tin, whether it be turkey breast, meat loaf, luncheon meat or Spam, which can be bought in a variety of forms including smoked, with chilli or laced with cheese for an extra calorie hit.

The common denominator, Tonga’s Chief Medical Officer Malakai Ake says, is that the “junk meat” is loaded with salt and saturated fats, meaning islanders’ waistlines continue to expand.
“This is the biggest issue facing Tonga,” he told AFP, citing soaring levels of weight-related coronary disease, diabetes and strokes among islanders.

“Every other day there’s a funeral, a next-door neighbour, a relative, a friend. It’s always heart disease, diabetes, it’s ridiculous.”

The Tongan Health Department says more than 90 per cent of the total population is classed as overweight and more than 60 per cent is obese.

According to World Health Organisation (WHO) data released last year, Pacific island nations account for eight of the top 10 countries where the male population is overweight or obese.
Weight-related diseases are responsible for three-quarters of deaths in the region, Fiji-based WHO nutritionist Temo Waqanivalu said, with diabetes rates in some Pacific nations close to 50 per cent.
“It’s a problem that health systems are struggling to deal with,” he said.
“If you walk into a hospital in any of the Pacific countries, about 75-80 per cent of the surgeries are the result of non-communicable diseases linked to obesity.”
Experts say economic, cultural and lifestyle factors have combined to make the obesity epidemic, which is an increasing problem across the globe, more acute in the Pacific.
Ake said the traditional lifestyles, where people kept fit through farming and fishing, gave way to a more sedentary existence in recent years and motor vehicles became more readily available.
“In my young days we would walk everywhere and go swimming,” he said. “Now people use the car to go just a little way down the street.”

Traditional diets based around fish and root crops have also fallen out of favour, replaced with fatty foods imported from Western nations that islanders see as more convenient and prestigious.
“They are unable to compete with the glamour and flashiness of imported foods,” Waqanivalu said, adding that cash-strapped consumers in the Pacific often had little choice about making poor dietary choices.
“In some countries it’s cheaper to buy a fizzy drink than a bottle of water.
“When they go down the aisle of the supermarket, probably the last thing people are looking at is the nutritional information, they’re looking at the price.”
Pacific islanders sometimes argue that they naturally have big frames and are more prone to put on weight than other people, although it’s a theory Waqanivalu rejects.
He said a generous girth had long been seen as a sign of status in the Pacific but the message was slowly getting out that bigger is not necessarily better.
“We’re telling people that being large is OK but being fat is different and that’s what we’re beginning to see,” he said.

Tonga’s late King Tupou IV, who died in 2006, helped raise awareness about obesity in the 1990s, when he organised a national diet and exercise routine after receiving warnings from his doctors about his weight.
Listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the heaviest monarch in the world at almost 210 kilograms (463 pounds), he reportedly lost 70 kilograms.
But Tonga’s current Prime Minister Lord Tu’ivakano said more needed to be done to combat the obesity problem and his government would look at restricting imports such as mutton flaps — cheap, fatty sheep offcuts popular in the country.
“We have to go back to the old ways, just eating good food — taros, kumaras (sweet potatoes), yams,” he said
“It’s a matter of saying ‘sorry, you have to find an alternative’, probably eat fish rather than mutton flaps.”

Home safety: Installing stair gates, cabinet locks, and smoke detectors led to a drop in injury rates in young children in a new study that provided and set up the safety products in almost 200 homes.
Injuries that could be prevented by making the home environment safer were cut by more than two-thirds, the researchers found.
“It seems to me that there’s a number of hazards that children encounter in the home that we have failed to protect them from,” said Dr Bruce Lanphear from Cincinnati Children’s Environmental Health, one of the study’s authors.
This initiative, he told Reuters Health, “is actually amazingly effective. We didn’t expect to see quite this much benefit.”
Lanphear and his colleagues recruited about 350 expectant mothers and inspected their homes for possible injury hazards, including unlocked cabinets, unstable furniture, and accessible electrical sockets.
In a randomly selected group of half those mothers, the researchers discussed safety products with the family and installed all products the families agreed to when their babies were an average of 6 months old. All mothers in the study were also given information on injury risks and how to make their homes safer for kids.

ADHD drugs: The US drugs regulator said it was not recommending changes in the use of stimulants such as Adderall XR and Ritalin to treat hyperactivity, after a review of a study into potential heart disease risks from the drugs.

“At this time, FDA is not recommending any changes to the drug labels and or use of these medications,” the US Food and Drug Administration said on its website.
The FDA said it would give a full update after the final analyses on the potential impact of stimulant ADHD drugs on the risk of heart disease and strokes were evaluated.

Shares in British group Shire, which makes the stimulant Vyvanse as well as Adderall XR, rose 1.7 percent after analysts said the update clearly suggested the FDA had seen no obvious safety signals in the study.
“While not absolutely definitive, this is positive for the stimulant class and for Shire,” Beinstein analyst Jack Scannell said. “Concerns over the possibility of a bad outcome have curbed our enthusiasm for Shire.”
Justin Smith at MF Global said the news was unsurprising, as rigorous monitoring for any potential change in cardiovascular risk had been in place since the study started in 2007, but was still positive for sentiment.
Adderall XR carries a warning about cardiovascular risks for patient with serious heart problems, and doctors generally assess a patient’s cardiovascular history before starting treatment.