What a lark

On Saturday morning I was listening to Saturday Live on Radio 4 and a piece about punting in Cambridge.  Now I’ve done my share of punting, in the rather distant past, but the sound of the skylark was not a common accompaniment to those trips though it did feature in the radio programme’s soundtrack. It…

Fair enough Minister

On Monday I did an interview for the BBC Farming Today programme, with the NFU’s Guy Smith.  If you want to listen to that interview you can but you won’t learn anything new from it as the NFU is still in denial over the loss of farmland wildlife and the role that farming has played…

Letter from Defra

I am grateful to Defra Minister Richard Benyon for this reply to a letter which my MP, Louise Mensch, sent to him on 15 December concerning implementation of the EU Birds Directive. The letter asked about farmland birds, hen harriers and marine protected areas. The Minister’s civil servants have written him quite a detailed reply…

CAP

I’ve been thinking about the proposed CAP reform and chatting to a few people about it too. The attempt to move towards more equal payments across the EU cannot be other than fair – probably.  This is the agricultural equivalent of the idea of contraction and convergence.  If it were decided to do the same…