They are aghast at the prospect of having to double-tag vast numbers of sheep with electronically readable tags, so they can be individually tracked through their lives.

Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Hilary Benn, sympathises with their arguments against Electronic Identification (EID) and has postponed the start of the scheme from New Year 2008 to New Year 2010.

The concessions involve further extension of the deadlines for significant numbers of sheep. But the industry would still have to spend millions on unproven tag-reading systems – and many hours manually recording sheep which are exempt from electronic tagging.

The chief executive of the National Sheep Association, Peter Morris, said: "Defra is talking as if it has won the World Cup but it's not that clever. The bureaucrats have agreed to stagger the pain of the introduction, but they haven't budged on the central idea." That idea dates back to the BSE scare in the 1990s and the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001.

British sheep move around more than most, because of the traditional system of rearing on the uplands and fattening on the lowlands.

And British and Irish MEPs led an important EC committee into a vote for changes to the plan, which resulted in Defra announcing:

n No animal movements will have to be individually recorded until January 2011 – giving an extra year for preparation.

n No animals born before December 31, 2009 will have to be individually recorded on a movement document until December 31, 2011.

n No animal born before December 31, 2009 will have to be recorded if its only movement is to slaughter.

But the NFU's north east livestock committee chairman, Malcolm Corbett, said: "My members would give me stick for giving any thanks at all for derogations. Their attitude is Just Say No. The whole thing is a bureaucratic nightmare and if it goes ahead, I predict a shambles on the scale of (Heathrow's) Terminal 5."