Puffins, red-faced with embarrassment

It’s been a bad few weeks for the Puffin – only tenth in the vote for our national bird and listed in the European Red List of birds. It’s not having a good 2015. The first was just a bit of fun, the latter is a matter of life and extinction.  The Puffin is one…

Otmoor looking and sounding good!

I visited the RSPB nature reserve at Otmoor yesterday.  It was great! As we parked, we could hear lots of Whitethroats singing, some of them performing song flights over the car park, and Cuckoos singing in the distance too.  This was a promising start and the promise was kept. We were hardly out of earshot…

The milk of human kindness

There’s been a lot in the news about the price of milk recently because of the low prices that some farmers are receiving for their produce (see here, here and here for example). I still have a milkman who delivers (quite expensive) milk to the door several times a week but I am glad to…

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…

Paying farmers by results 2

Last week I posted a blog about paying by results in agri-environment schemes which generated lots of comments.  Here’s another way that we could pay by results.  Like any system, including the current failing one, this proposal has its problems of monitoring, cost, fairness etc but it’s worth thinking about alternatives when the current system…