Standing up for Nature
Very glad to see that my local Leaf farmer, Duncan Farrington (as featured in Chapter 8 of A Message from Martha) has been short-listed in the Grocer Gold Awards 2015. Duncan is a modern farmer – entrepreneurial, green and hard-working. It will soon be time for me to see whether he still has perhaps the…
Although I worked as a forester I actually studied Agricultural & Forest Science under the great agricultural educationalist Mike Soper. Even back in the 70s I remember the question ‘where does it all end?’ was being asked – the risks of flash-over resistance to antibiotics from pigs to humans as a result of them being…
Regular readers of this blog will remember the mystery of the dying hedge near where I live in Northamptonshire (see here, here and all the comments on the blogs). Local artist , and designer of the jacket for A Message from Martha, Carry Akroyd, once painted this hedge because it was so beautiful (see below)….
You remember that the NFU President was quoted by Farmers Weekly as saying that there are ‘10 times more ground-nesting birds in the Gloucestershire area since the cull started‘? Well, I ‘phoned up the NFU Press Office and what sounded like a nice young man told me that this was based on anecdotal evidence. No,…
The good thing about this strange statement from the NFU is that they are wanting more vaccination of badgers. One of the strange things is that they seem to think that it is the job of wildlife charities to provide it rather than their own industry or government. This represents, it appears, quite a lurch…