Farming Today irritates me a lot – and it would iritate me often if I listened to it often but its timing means I am usually finishing the first piece of work of the day prior to making the first cup of tea of the day. But sometimes, as with yesterday morning, I give it…
Category: FARMING
Farming Today – a belated thank you
I’ve been meaning to write this short post for weeks. Regular and long-term readers of this blog may remember that I have had issues with Farming Today – the early morning BBC Radio 4 farming programme. See Farming Today – not today and not tomorrow, 16 October 2018. But those same regular readers of this…
Guest blog – Farmland Tax Breaks Revealed by Miles King
Miles King is Chief Executive of People Need Nature a charity working to highlight the sensory, emotional and spiritual values of nature. He has worked in nature conservation for 30 years, leading the conservation work at Plantlife, The Grasslands Trust and Buglife. He has also worked for English Nature, Natural England and as a consultant….
General Licence confusion
I’d written the following blog post before hearing that Defra are announcing new, or not so new, general licences overnight. Wild Justice will be looking carefully at these and consulting with our lawyers over the next few days. One of the things that has really struck me about the whole business of reforming the general…
Only farming ministers have to have some knowledge of their subject
I’m catching up on news items here as I’ve been away from my home computer and driving around the UK, or so it seems, for weeks. Robert Goodwill is the new Minister of State in Defra with responsibility for farming – he is a farmer (although his main crop seems to be dead people). Conservative…
A spring-like winter bird survey
I was back to my farmland site to do the February visit for the English Winter Farmland Bird Survey on Sunday. It was a sunny day – and actually warmer than some May early mornings when I have surveyed this square for the BBS. There was a lot of bird song and so it felt,…
Guest blog – Winds of Change by Derek Gow
Derek Gow is a farmer – you can see from the image opposite he is a serious farmer. Here he writes about the future he has chosen for his farm. Winds of change For those who don’t farm it’s difficult to understand the mentality of those that do. While James Reebanks in his excellent book…
Neonics in Swiss House Sparrows
I saw this study and thought it was pretty interesting. See here for some info on what IP Suisse means – it seems like it is a bit like LEAF farms in UK.
Go back in time on the IoW – particularly if you are a farmer
By Ordnance Survey – map from 1945, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org One of the attractions of visiting the Isle of Wight is that you just get a little taste of what the UK was like in the 1950s – that’s why the OS map above is so appropriate. You almost expect to see items in the…
Farming Today – not today and not tomorrow
I rarely listen to Farming Today on the radio even though I am almost always awake when it airs (before 6am). That’s for two reasons – it’s my most productive time of day so I am usually writing something and the programme is so irritating (although, since I rarely listen (except when someone tells me…