Farrington’s rapeseed oil leads the world – press release

Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil Becomes World’s First Food Product Certified as Carbon and Plastic Neutral* Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil has made history by becoming the world’s first food product to be certified as both carbon and plastic neutral. The entire Farrington’s Mellow Yellow range of oils, salad dressings and…

ASDA doesn’t compromise

If you see a farmer in tears then it will either be tears of laughter over Theresa Villiers’s speech at the Oxford Farming Conference or perhaps they are upset, for farmers do get upset by this type of thing, over ASDA’s advert for vegetarian food. This is a strange advert because the message is not…

NFU – there’s a useful course…

‘The NFU reacted angrily…’ is a common occurrence – try searching for it online and you’ll find a lot of examples. Today’s example, at least as reported on Today, is the NFU reaction to Ian Boyd’s suggestion that the future British countryside will have more hedges and trees and fewer grazing animals in it. This…

Farming Today again

Farming Today went back this morning to their not entirely accurate story from yesterday about the RSPB having a look at its policy on game shooting. Apart from the repetition of Martin Harper’s out-of-date ‘up to 50 million gamebirds’ (figure from GWCT is now 47m Pheasants and 10m Red-legged Partridges which is a long way…

Farming Today on RSPB and game shooting

Martin Harper was interviewed on Farming Today this morning. Martin did well but it was one of those unsatisfactory interviews where Anna Hill simply got lots of things wrong – listen here from about 9 minutes into the programme through until the end. In the introduction (which Martin won’t have heard until today) Hill says…

Pretty lame – Woman’s Hour

Yesterday Woman’s Hour (a BBC Radio 4 programme – click here and listen after 23 minutes) got together Minette Batters of the NFU, Marian Spain of Natural England and Beccy Speight of the RSPB on the pretext that there are a lot of women running the environment. In the case of the NFU that is…

Vegetarian food and the NFU

This is apparently a controversial video – a Dad (controversial!) cooking (controversial!) his daughter a vegetarian meal because that’s what she wants (controversial!). The NFU issued a statement – click here – where it expresses its ‘significant concerns’ and its worries about the ‘distress caused to British farmers’. I’ve felt for a long time that…

Who are ‘we’?

I read a letter in Tuesday’s Guardian with interest. It was under the name of a former, highly respected, RSPB colleague of mine, Gareth Morgan, who now works for the Soil Association. Gareth’s main point is that radical change to farming is need, presumably including lots more organic farming, in order to have more wildlife…

Listen again to Farming Today

Farming Today last Saturday morning had a discussion about shooting between Andrew Gilruth of GWCT and Pat Thompson of RSPB. Pat did very well but it’s more interesting to listen to Gilruth I think. He rarely answers the question. He reminds me so much of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s performance in Parliament yesterday evening – smooth, unruffled,…