Do you look forward to, or dread, reading your new emails? I’m quite keen on mine, partly because, just occasionally, I get one like this:
As a farmer I have often been a bit sensitive to your opinions, but at least I now know you allow that some of us are the good guys!
I did know something about the passenger pigeon, apparently a lot more than your average American, before reading your book. However, I was profoundly shocked and moved by your book. Books rarely move me to tears, other than some Thomas Hardy stories, but I wept a lot for the passing of the passenger pigeon and a lot more besides. I am old enough to have heard corncrakes as a child (in N.Ireland) and it grieves me that we are wiping out so many other creatures.
When we drove through a summer’s night thirty years’ ago the windscreen of the car would be marked by the bodies of many insect casualties. Not that I wish to kill anything, but I find it disturbing how rarely this happens now.
I live in Devon and farm organically. Someone who came to visit me commented on how many birds there were around and I was surprised because I don’t think there are nearly enough. Yesterday I was driving some six miles from a town back home so I started to count the birds I noticed on route. There were only four until near home, so they didn’t distract me from driving! Happily I saw a dozen or more fly past in the last half mile.
What is the point of life if we have no one (apart from far too many humans) to share the planet with? I shall be buying some more copies of your book to send to people for Christmas.
Barbara Barker
Signed copies of A Message from Martha can be bought direct from the author – [email protected]
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Well done, no wonder you’re rightly chuffed with this email, fantastic sentiments beautifully expressed. Bet your publisher likes it too!
There are hundreds lf good farmers in this country. Their problem is that the voice of farming in this country is the NFU – and they are the voice of agri-business and environmental vandalism. The fact that the NFU’s membership is a minority of all farmers (about one-fifth) does not affect their ability to influence government. Their input is unremittingly pernicious – look at the badger cull: they are the only people actively lobbying for it – cosy support for a government intent on using badgers as a smokescreen for failing to protect the vast majority of farmers from the depredations of supermarkets and processors.
Thanks, Simon – well put – and thanks to Barbara for a lovely message.
Re the NFU..some us haven’t forgotten the virulent knee jerk reaction against walkers by their hierarchy at the start of the awful 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak….and of course after it was shown it was actually being spread by stock movements there was no apology. I hope that farmers appreciate the huge sympathy and sacrifices by many non farming users of the countryside at that terrible time – when the rest of the population stayed away from farmland in droves…
I would be pleased with those comments. I read and liked your book.
“What is the point of life if we have no one (apart from far too many humans) to share the planet with?”
I would struggle to say what the ‘point’ of life is but I very much agree that without all the myriads of other plants and animals that we share the planet with it would seem a great deal less worth living (assuming we even could survive without them).
Always have thought that conservationists believe NFU represent all farmers and carry far more influence than is actually the fact.When dairy farming fact was every time NFU lobbyed for better price for cereals it was exactly the opposite to my needs as a buyer of cereals.
My guess is about the Badger cull they are desperate to do something as the cost of compensation for all these cattle getting slaughtered must be horrific,what a pity the Badger Trust has not the membership to have some say in the matter and give vaccination a go.
I would much rather see the army of stop the cull people trying to disrupt the cull being used positively for looking at traps for vaccination.
Dennis – NFU certainly doesn’t represent all farmers (but farmers rarely argue with the NFU in public) but it is certainly true that the NFU has a lot of influence with governments of both reflections. Far more influence than an unrepresentative body should have.
Mark , the farmer whose land i live on and work for has A Message from Martha. I presume he liked it because then he bought Inglorious.
Well done Barbara. Long may your farm and it’s creatures flourish!
Thanks to the people saying NFU doesn’t include all farmers. We should publicise that fact much more widely. As an ignorant townie I had no idea. In fact I suppose I thought it was almost something farmers were inevitably part of – like being in the BMA if you’re a doctor – no choice. You guys need to set up an alternative group for yourselves to campaign for your real interests. “The Good NFU” perhaps! [Could there be a blog on that Mark perhaps? As I say, I had no idea at all. Bet most conservation supporters are the same, let alone the general population. They think that when the NFU speaks on subsidies etc it represents the views of almost all farmers.]