I heard two good things on Farming Today, today – this is the second. After hearing Luke Pollard talking fish, I heard another good speaker a bit later in Farming Today, Rosie Woodroffe talking Badgers. Now I do know Rosie a bit, not very well but a bit, and I have a lot of time…
Category: FARMING
Farming Today, today (1)
I heard two good things on Farming Today, today – this is the first. When I turned on I’d just missed the beginning of the programme and there was some bloke talking about marine fisheries. I didn’t recognise him but he seemed pretty fired up, spoke very well and as he talked I thought ‘I…
News: English general licences, for 2021, published – and they are different
DEFRA has just published the general licences for England for 2021 (helpfully alongside the existing licences which expire on 31 December 2020 so that one can compare and contrast). Click here for ‘conservation’ licences. Click here for serious damage licences. Click here for safety licences. I’m reading them, as are the Wild Justice lawyers.
Press release – RSPB’s Hope Farm
Two decades of nature friendly farming see bird numbers soar more than ten times Nature-friendly farming practices have seen butterfly numbers quadruple, winter farmland bird numbers rise 1,200% and given a massive boost to bumblebees while turning a profit Farmland covers 75% of the UK making it vital in the fight to reverse nature’s decline…
Farming today interview
Depending on when you read this, I may be just about to be on Radio 4 Farming Today talking about the Wild Justice legal challenge of gamebird releases (if before 0545-0555) or you were sleeping happily through it. I’ll put the link in here later. Here is the link (last 5 minutes of programme). I…
Tale of a hedge (re-revisited)
In 2014 I wrote a few blogs about a puzzling hedge (see here, here, here) and I revisited it in 2017 (see here). The resolution to the puzzle was that a farmer had driven down the road with his spray still on and had, accidentally, sprayed over a mile of roadside hedge. This happened, probably…
Licence 19020225, and its 1,156 friends
A little while ago Bob Berzins wrote two guest blogs here Natural England licences; a cover up? Part 1 and Natural England licences; a cover up? Part 2. My precis of these two blogs is as follows: Blog 1: The General Licences for the purpose of nature conservation were withdrawn by Natural England in an…
Down on the farm…
This morning, early, I paid a visit to the workplace of one of my favourite farmers: Duncan Farrington’s place down the road from me, the home of the Mellow Yellow range. Those who have read the last chapter of A Message from Martha might have guessed what my visit was about, and yes, I was…
Silage (a little bit more)
Following on from yesterday and silage production and Curlews (and I am grateful to a reader for pointing me to this paper); This graph, note the logarithmic scale of the Y-axis, shows the increase in silage production, in Great Britain, from practically nothing to rather a lot over a century or so. This will not…
The unchecked march of silage…
At lunchtime I wrote of some errors of avian population trends in Magnus Linklater’s recent opinion piece on the demise of the Curlew. It’s a good example of how all opinions are valid, but that facts are sacred, and that if your opinion doesn’t fit with the facts then maybe you should rethink. By the…