Bitter harvest?

Around where I live the combines are out in the fields working by day and into the night.  It’s a bit unusual that some farmers are getting in their wheat before the end of the barley or rape harvests.  The high prices of wheat mean that everything depends on a good wheat harvest and yields…

Something for the weekend sir?

I love farmers.  Well, admittedly not all of them, but then I don’t love all birdwatchers, all RSPB members or all of anything – maybe all hen harriers? But I do love the fact that some farmers are doing a fantastic job with the help of my taxpayer’s money on their farms. We have come…

The raptor haters – Richard Ingrams

The raptor haters is an occasional series of articles on people who slag off birds of prey. Richard Ingrams finds red kites ‘menacing‘, ‘savage‘ and ‘unlikeable‘ and is ‘pleased to see a picture of a dead one‘.  Every three years or so he dips his pen in poison and is really nasty about these magnificent…

Thunder

I woke this morning to the sound of thunder.  Whereas Aristotle may have thought that this was the sound of clouds colliding I wonder whether it is the sound of disagreements in the EU over the future funding of CAP.  Or maybe Peter Kendall is still trying to tell Charles Clover how much he enjoyed…

Income support for farmers

The argument that Pillar 1 income support for farmers keeps food prices low for all of us is pretty far-fetched.  In the bad old days, subsidies were tied to production – you got paid by the taxpayer for every tonne of wheat you produced whether the market wanted it or not and that led to…