A SELF-HELP group set up by farmers at the height of Wensleydale's foot-and-mouth outbreak was praised by animal health minister Elliot Morley during a fact-finding visit to North Yorkshire on Monday.

Mr Morley was at the Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes for a breakfast meeting with farmers recovering from last year's foot-and-mouth crisis.

He met members of Rejuvenate, which met monthly throughout the crisis and provided a network of information and advice for farmers caught up in the epidemic.

Mr Morley said the group was exactly the sort of working together that the Government encouraged and he wanted to see similar projects launched in other areas.

"Rejuvenate and the work it has undertaken, in co-operation with Defra, to help farmers to develop their own plans, is a positive contribution to the future of farming in this region," he said.

The Minister heard how many farmers were choosing to re-stock with higher quality, but fewer, animals. Many were also joining enviromental schemes, while others diversified through rural enterprise scheme grants.

Some members of the group supplying Hawes Creamery had opted to re-stock with Jersey cattle, whose milk commanded a premium.

The creamery lost 40pc of its suppliers in the epidemic. which infected 133 North Yorkshire farms, 12 of them in the dale.

The creamery suppliers' group chairman, William Lambert, was the first farmer in the county to be hit when the virus was confirmed at Raygill, between Bainbridge and Hawes, on March 7 last year.

Mr Morley's visit came as the official all-clear was given to the area around Hawnby, near Thirsk, where two lambs were culled last week in a foot-and-mouth scare.

Mr Phillip Holden, Rejuvenate chairman, described the meeting with Mr Morley as "very, very constructive" but long overdue.

"We have managed, through Rejuvenate, to keep the social fabric of the farming fraternity together over the last 12 months. At each meeting we still have a minimum of 80."

Monthly meetings would no longer be held, but the group would continue its work and planned to meet in October to review the situation.

Mr Holden hoped development of the Hawes Creamery and the abattoir at East Borwins, near Bainbridge, would focus ministers' attention on the upper dale.

"There is a consensus that farming is going through a period of change and that we can not go back to the pre-foot-and-mouth situation on livestock," he said.

They had to strike a balance between movement restrictions and the needs of the sheep sector; to decide how to implement the Curry report in the Yorkshire Dales, and to look at how best to use grants and at how to have a simplified, single point of contact for farmers on the range of support available. "That is something which Rejuvenate has done very well," said Mr Holden.

Also at the meeting were Defra officials David Stirling and James Hodgson, countryside stewardship project officer for the area, who saw his parents' dairy herd at Askrigg culled