An open letter to Peter Kendall, President of the NFU

Dear Peter As the President of the National Farmers Union you claim to be the ‘voice of farming’ and last week you made a speech where you said that there is no ‘biodiversity crisis’ and government should ‘switch its focus from biodiversity’ to production. Speaking as one of the people who pays for your and…

The raptor haters? Robin Page.

Robin Page clearly is special.  He has issues.  When you read his own words it is difficult not to think that he has a lot of pent up anger that needs to spill out now and again (see here and here). And so it comes as no surprise that he is angry about birds of…

Why do they do this?

The reaction from the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation to yesterday’s RSPB report on the numbers of poisonings of birds of prey was a bit predictable. After making the arguable claim that gamekeeping is a ‘profession‘ the NGO makes the obligatory nod in the direction of upholding the law and then talks about the ‘surge’ in birds…

FWAG

The Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group is ‘expected to go into administration in the coming days’. Henry Lucas the FWAG Chair of Trustees has written to a range of organisations giving them the bad news. FWAG is a little over 40 years old and has been a respected part of the wildlife and farming scene…

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…