Well done to the RSPB, and the Wildlife Trusts, for launching an impressive e-action over the weekend to persuade the Prime Minister to back his Secretary of State and go ahead with a 15% transfer of funds from one part of the CAP (the rather useless part) to another part of the CAP (the rather…
Category: FARMING
Charles Clover’s £398
I like Charles Clover but I don’t (by any means) always agree with him. His column in today’s Sunday Times is entitled ‘Greedy farmers a-milking it, no turtle doves and no partridges either‘ and describes Peter Kendall as ‘the cocky ambassador of agri-business‘. Wow! Even I am more polite about PK than that! Charles Clover,…
More on that 15%
Although the NFU says that it has written to every MP on the subject of CAP reform they don’t put that letter (or those letters) on their website as far as I can see. What they do say on their website is that they are ‘increasingly infuriated‘ with the government position. Only the farming industry…
Where will your £400 go?
As I was driving home from Cheltenham races yesterday I was switching through the radio channels and heard the Deputy President of the NFU and my former colleague Gareth Morgan on PM (click here – after 20 mins). Meurig Raymond clearly hasn’t been paying much attention to the silver-tongued Peter Kendall as his answers weren’t…
Sad
The State of the UK’s Birds 2013 was published yesterday. It’s packed with beautiful photographs, clear graphs and maps and lots of information. It’s not all bad news – but there is quite a lot of bad news there. This is how the story was covered by the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Mirror, Express….
Thank you Andy Sawford MP
I wrote to my MP last week and received a very prompt reply from him on Monday this week! That’s impressive and I am very grateful for the speed and content of his reply. Mr Sawford has written to Owen Paterson on my behalf asking the Secretary of State ‘the extent to which Defra use…
New CLA President – Henry Robinson
The new President of the CLA is Henry Robinson – well, he’s no longer that new, he’s been in post a couple of weeks. I’ve always liked Henry (though I don’t know him that well – maybe I’m too quick to like). Anyone who I occasionally meet at Cheltenham racecourse starts with a slight advantage…
Naughtily nutty – the rspb
The rspb is following other farmers into the rapeseed oil business. I visited Ian Dillon at Hope Farm last week and had a chat about it with him. Regular readers of this blog might recall that the rspb bought Hope Farm when I was Conservation Director and so I have a quasi-proprietorial interest in it….
CAP consultation – here’s one I prepared earlier (and have updated slightly)
In each part of the UK, the governments are consulting on how the tweaked Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) should be implemented. I have drafted my response to the Defra consultation and here it is for people to comment on. If you like it you can simply copy and paste it into the consultation and send…
Bird Atlas – Farmland birds
Pictures can get messages across better than words sometimes. As one flicks through the pages of this Atlas one keeps seeing farmland species with shrinking distributions. But the key to truly appreciating the scale of what is happening to these familiar birds is to look at the maps of change of relative abundance. Time after…