I think it is over 20 years since I stopped trusting the NFU at all. I have quite liked some of the leading NFU characters over that time but I haven’t respected the organisation and its grip on the truth in that time.
On Friday George Monbiot exposed an example that shows you the type of thing that goes on.
Everybody and every organisation is two-faced to a degree but we’ve seen some good examples on this blog recently. Decathlon want to be seen as wildlife-friendly but also want to appeal to a market of hunters killing birds, optics companies want to appeal to birdwatchers and birdkillers, PM Johnson wants to appear as though he is simultaneously going for a no-deal Brexit and a good-deal Brexit, and now the NFU want environmental standards maintained and watered down all at the same time. And then there was that webinar between former fox hunters, now, of course, trail hunters, saying things that they would have worded differently if they thought that everyone would hear their words. It’s more difficult for organisations to speak with a forked tongue these days without being caught out.
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That’s exactly why some many devious ****** voted for and funded the campaign for the turd that is brexit: so they could make more money with fewer protections for nature and people
I think this accusation can certainly be levelled with justification at the leaders of the Brexit campaign. Those who voted for it had a variety of reasons, some better than others, but many simply had an inchoate distrust of a ‘foreign’ organisation (fuelled by a steady stream of distorted bile from the Daily Mail and its ilk) and an ‘ingurland-ingurland-ingurland’ sense of patriotism that enabled them to be convinced we would be better off on our own. Unfortunately for these people they will probably not be the ones who will profit from any erosion of standards that emerges in the coming years.
There was only ever one reason for voting for Brexit, and that was racism. There were a variety of ways racists sold it to themselves without wanting to admit they were racist, however
I did not mean to imply that everyone who voted for brexit (which the spellchecker still doesn’t like, by the way: must be an EU spellchecker) had that as their motivation – poorly expressed on my part. Just that many of the cynical orchestrators of the campaign had reasons like this.
I’d urge you to consider the whole picture, these things are seldom black and white.
https://twitter.com/Tom_Clarke/status/1337737078789038082?s=19
Growers in France, Belgium, Spain and Poland. will be allowed to use neonic seed treatments next year.
I’m not an expert, but farmers need a break crop. If CAP was converted into an insurance guarantee to make up the return of an expected crop of so many tons per acre based on past (insecicided) yields the public good would be the ditching of the neonic.. The treasury probably wont like budgeting for such retrospective payments.
The treasury may find it easier to go back to a payment where the amount is known in advance like a set aside/break crop payment but it will be larger.
Looking on the bright side the pink foot will still have their greens.
If anyone has a better idea?
So I guess you can put your money on the flying cert that neonics are here to stay .
Ethical Consumer produced a report on the NFU back in 2017, concluding that it was not national, did not include most farmers and was not really a union. So what does one expect?
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/national-farmers-union
In the interest of balance here is the NFU’s response
https://www.nfuonline.com/response-ethical-consumer-report-on-the-nfu/
On balance I personally would tend to trust what Ethical Consumer said rather than the NFU, given the latter’s history
There is an interesting Twitter thread on the sugar beet subject from one farmer’s point of view here. https://twitter.com/Tom_Clarke/status/1337737078789038082?s=20
Read this twitter feed with interest, however Neonics are at least partly persistent in weeds at the edge of fields 9 the weeds that sustain some of the low population pests and thus their predators will be killed by this. Whilst we all celebrate the Pink feet and Wild Swans Neonics are poisonous to birds as shown by work in both the US and The Netherlands so we may be on the brink of disaster for these big birds and it may be a contributory factor in the decline of farmland birds. The NFU has long been known as a non-union and hardly represents all farmers and is generally a force for the arable barons and not public good. Brexit as Rod says may contribute to a race to the bottom in our standards a doubly horrible prospect for our food sustainability cost and environmental damage. The political right and their ludicrous sovereignty claims( nobody is sovereign in this interconnected world) will have an awful lot to answer for in the near future never mind HS2.
This is the meaning of ‘sovereignty’, a race to the bottom rather than the proud battleships sailing the high seas the Brexiteers would like you to imagine.
So the Battleships in question are Hood, Prince of Wales, and Repulse. Seems about right.
Surprised at you Mark, ‘conflating’ different issues but i see things similarly. It started long before Trump. I blame Blair for showing that absolutely anything goes. There are no limits to lying and the vast majority of the public can’t manage that amount of bad news and so escape or ignore it. The circle continues.
Minor victories becomes sources of great celebration.
And all the more reason to keep fighting. No victory was ever achieved without fighting and often at what seemed like at the beginning insurmountable odds.
If I were a farmer I’d make it damned clear that the NFU in absolutely no way whatsoever represented me – most certainly not the person I am. I really wish more farmers did that because what the NFU has always screamed out to me is that they were there solely on behalf of mega greedy bastards who wanted to suck every single penny they could out of the taxpayer, consumer and the land itself with the very least inconvenience to themselves. That’s all, selfish, ignorant, ultra greedy shits. I do know there are good farmers, but that’s in spite of what the NFU represents. The ‘Peoples’ Manifesto for Wildlife’ did single them out as a bad agent, but they’re probably the closest thing we do have for a representative body for the farming community, is there another organisation that has bigger support from them? They need to be publicly torn to shreds at every opportunity, but I can’t see that happening on Countryfile.
I’d urge you to consider the whole picture, these things are seldom black and white.
https://twitter.com/Tom_Clarke/status/1337737078789038082?s=19
No certainly not on Countryfile.
Subscription-based trade organisation has restricts web-access to members. What a notion!
“massive” – BS. Maybe the beet growers are hacked-off because use of neonic seed treatments on winter cereals are stll allowed. The ratio of winter cereals to sugar beet areas is massive.
It’s clear that many years of neonic use, delivered to sugar beet seed via pelletised seed coating, has not devastated populations of aphids sufficiently to eliminate beet mild yellowing virus, and this disease still develops fast and widely enough to knock back yield of sugar by ~30%. If it were not neonics it would be some other pesticide – so short of BMYV-resistant beet a pesticide will always be used, which usually means that some non-target species will be affected however non-persistent and immobile the active ingredient is.
Without a food and beverage manufacturing market no-one would grow sugar beet so perhaps it is the growing of all crops for sugar and starch what needs curtailing. The public benefits would be immense – less soil damage, massive reduction of fertiliser, pesticide, fossil fuel use, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, dental caries. Sure it would be unpopular with a lot of people for many reasons but we could have a return to proper food and the fake food industry would thankfully collapse. No doubt its shills and acolytes would wail and gnash their teeth – if they have any left. We would need draconian action against sugar imports but think how this would benefit the cane-field labourers who could stop dying of kidney failure and live longer and more fulfilled lives in poverty. Or we could pay them reparations for all the past consumption of cane sugar we are guilty of. In fact I would welcome it if this largesse could be extended to anyone whose health has been damaged by sugar, syrup, sugary drinks, Victoria Sponge or jammy scones. The money could be raised by retrospective taxation of anyone who has profited by these sales. So what if the parasites went bankrupt? Mr Sunak would just print some more money to fix it.
Former beet farmers could keep their very expensive tackle earning its keep by swapping to growing very large parsnips but I guess there is a limit to how much parsnip we as a nation would eat. A traditional means of compensation would be to acknowledge the non-growing of sugar beet as a public benefit, as it undoubtedly would be, and payments could be geared to reflect how much sugar beet a grower didn’t grow. This should please europhiles who will remember the wonderful Schemes of Yesteryear when growers were paid £Lots for not growing other things so a reintroduction of the through-the-looking-glass principles of the CAP should make lots of people very happy.
Well never ever was a supporter of NFU but thank goodness the Labour party never ever told packs of lies.
Has the NFU ever told the truth?
Never knowingly.
Nice to see some links here to what really goes on in farming.
For many years farmers haven’t trusted environmental organisations.
This story perfectly illustrates why.
Environmental groups are perfectly content to export their problems to others. Sugar Beet production in the UK is unviable without virus control as are oilseeds. The market will be displaced to areas where these crops are viable.
Lack of trust works both ways. A perfectly acceptable compromise based around increased stewardship of the products could be achieved but without mutual trust this is unrealistic.
Julian – and a covert lobbying campaign (shhh! don’t tell anyone!) is a perfect wway to get trust?
Mark,
If you don’t trust someone; guess what ? You don’t tell them do you ?
If you don’t trust them because you consider they have no stake in the outcomes; guess what ? You don’t tell them.
Understanding people has never been your strong point.
Julian – we all have a stake in farming because 1) we give you farmers money through our taxes 2) we all give farmers money through buying food and 3) we all are affected by farming’s impacts in our environment.
But farming doesn’t recognise its customers and sponsors. You’ve never been any good at that.
“If you don’t trust someone; guess what ? You don’t tell them do you?”
This is exactly the same type of mealy mouthed excuse the shooting industry uses, when they’re confronted by environmental groups about raptor persecution and their complete lack of action.
As for ‘understanding people’, you do realise that the NFU’s behaviour just reinforces the complete lack of trust people have in them, right? You’re effectively saying they will never be able to provide any solutions to these issues, because any type of scrutiny they face can be batted away by ‘not trusting’ people.
Mark, just to elaborate on this; because actually it really winds me up. You have absolutely no stake in the outcomes of all this . You just move on to the next campaign leaving the farmers to pick up the bill. The Cruiser ban on OSR cost my company £63,000 in the first year alone. We grew a perfectly legitimate crop, made the forward sales to deliver pre planting and then and had no option to go forward with the crop after the imposition of the ban. We have contracts with British Sugar that are signed before the crop is planted; again we pick up the bill. The losses on beet alone this year on virus damage were eye watering. You want us to trust you ? I don’t think so.
Julian – we all have a stake in farming because 1) we give you farmers money through our taxes 2) we all give farmers money through buying food and 3) we all are affected by farming’s impacts in our environment.
This is exactly the type of arrogant response I’ve come to expect from someone involved in an industry that is constantly bailed out, subsidised and becomes ultra defensive at the very hint of any scrutiny. Everyone has a stake in the outcomes of this, as we are all reliant on the same biosphere in order to survive. You want to have your cake and eat it by constantly stating how important the environment is, and subsequently how important farming is, yet become completely dismissive when people challenge environmentally destructive practices.
Mark; Oh so the check is in the post is it ? Clever words but we end up with the bill and you get the kudos. Our stake in the outcomes costs significant monies; yours is nothing.
We don’t trust you and we won’t work with you until we see some acceptance of shared outcomes.
That is what state subsidies are for, to help cushion you against situations like this. You have been making sure you’ve managed those correctly, right? You’ve created a cushion fund, and not just spent it all and called it part of your normal budget?