FWAG

The Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group is ‘expected to go into administration in the coming days’. Henry Lucas the FWAG Chair of Trustees has written to a range of organisations giving them the bad news. FWAG is a little over 40 years old and has been a respected part of the wildlife and farming scene…

CFE

I wonder how the Campaign for the Farmed Environment is going? This is the Big Society alternative to regulating  farming to replace the environmental benefits of set-aside.  It’s difficult to tell how it is going from the Campaign website. Minister Jim Paice will have to decide how it is all going before Christmas in order…

CAP

I’ve been thinking about the proposed CAP reform and chatting to a few people about it too. The attempt to move towards more equal payments across the EU cannot be other than fair – probably.  This is the agricultural equivalent of the idea of contraction and convergence.  If it were decided to do the same…

A grain of truth

The dry spring weather in England (while I was driving through the rain in the USA) prompted fears about the grain harvest which, it is good to record here, have proved to be largely unfounded.  As in any year there have been winners and losers across the country but the UK wheat yield is estimated…

Not to everybody’s liking

The proposals for a new Common Agricultural Policy have not been welcomed with uniform approval. The existing system is not simple and understanding the changes is not simple either.  It will take time before all the implications are thought through but here is a rather good summary (it’s a good summary but it isn’t light…