I’ve explained (in oh so broad terms!) how we got to where we are with European Agriculture Policy (see here). This blog is about what’s wrong with the current position. Public policy tends to evolve through tweaks and reform rather than by massive change, and the pace of reform is bound to be slow when…
Category: FARMING
Guest blog – ELS/HLS madness by Andrew Carter
Andrew Carter is a farmer in South Wilts with a pedigree Aberdeen-Angus herd which is making use of both chalk downland and meadows in the Hampshire Avon valley – much within the current Higher Level Stewardship scheme. He practices conventional arable farming, but with a high quantity of environmental balancing. A lifelong interest in natural…
Good news for farmland birds and taxpayers
An RSPB -led study demonstrates that well-designed agri-environment schemes can help farmland birds to recover towards their previous levels. This information is important at a time when the UK may be escaping the constraints of the EU Common Agricultural Policy and will be free to do a better job (or indeed a worse one) in…
Bird Fair books – review – Farming and Birds by Ian Newton
I sometimes wonder how many New Naturalists are read rather than collected as an investment – well this one should be read. Ian Newton has never produced a duff book – his works are characterised by clarity and suffused by a deep knowledge of the biology of the subjects on which he writes. This one…
Letter to my MP
Dear Mr Pursglove Thank you for your response to my earlier letters, and I have just received the response from Chris Skidmore MP, Cabinet Office, on the Lobbying Act. But before I comment briefly on those responses, and return to another issue, may I congratulate you on your appointment as PPS to Dr Liam Fox…
Farming subsidy debate gets moving…
We’ll have to see what ‘Green Brexit’ Gove actually says today, and then watch like hawks (harriers, eagles, kites and falcons) what he actually does. But there is clearly something afoot when the Today programme stirs itself on the subject of agricultural payments (click here and two bits – at 08:10 and 08:55). The first…
Farming Today? No thank you.
I received this email a little while ago from Farming Today: Dear Mark, We’d like to interview you this afternoon for BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today programme about the appointment of Michael Gove as Defra Secretary. Would you be able to go to a radio studio sometime between 1445 and 1545 this afternoon? It will…
Brexit – so that’s all very clear then?
If the general election is about Brexit then we should by now have a clear idea of what will happen to environmental protection and agricultural policy after Brexit. In particular, we should have a clear idea from the Conservative Party, although Labour (the only realistic alternative government (even though, in places other parties’ candidates may…
Farming Today on licensing for game shoots in Scotland.
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Farming Today interviewed Ian Thomson from the RSPB about last Wednesday’s proposals to license game shooting in Scotland. Starts 7 minutes 20 seconds into the programme. RSPB not against driven grouse shooting. Scottish Land and Estates all in favour of stamping out wildlife crime but did a Theresa May and sent a note instead of…
Election comment 6 – reports
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There was a bit of a fuss last week when the government, it was revealed, stopped the publication of NHS budget data – expected to be shockingly bad news – because Whitehall is in ‘electoral purdah‘. Now, as I recall, the purdah rules are really there to stop government putting out lots of good news…