WalesOnline - Up Country

farmer or faker?

2009-02-04T09:45:07Z

One of my previous entries about GM drew a comment from Jonathan Harrington. This is the farmer who claimed to have grown the only GM maize approved for cultivation in Europe on his Breconshire farm, AND given it to two un-named neighbours, AND used it in silage fed to livestock in the area, in defiance of both the Welsh Assembly Government's policy on GM and normal scientific caution over material that has never been tested for long-term effects on consumers, whether human or animal.

It was a poke in the eye from a man who also describes himself as a farm advisor for the anti-GM campaigners, and perhaps designed to embarrass the Welsh Government and expose its impotence. My colleague Martin Shipton broke the story in the Western Mail and it was followed up weeks later in the Observer.
Harrington refers to himself as "a farmer" and refers to "my Welsh farm". His story could be seen as a small triumph for an ordinary grower wanting to plant a registered crop. whatever rules some faceless bureaucracy might impose.
Some who have looked into the matter GM technology have found that it may not be all it claims to be. Its propagandists occupy the moral high ground of "feeding the world" - although a UN scientific study says GM simply cannot do that. But its manufacturers concentrate on developing crops that can reward their shareholders by requiring farmers to depend on the pesticides they also produce, some of which may contribute towards cancers. The US Agriculture Department says GM crops DO NOT produce higher yields than conventional varieties.
Now it appears that Mr Harrington himself may not be all he claims to be. He lives so high up a mountain that even conventional fodder maize (let alone a Mediterranean GM hybrid) would not produce a decent crop. And as he is also sadly disabled, he cannot have planted or harvested the crop himself.
It makes you wonder whether the whole episode was a con by Harrington and CropGen, in order to embarrass the Welsh Government. Has Mr Harrington actually grown GM plants at all? His neighbours think not.
Mr Harrington read a previous blog on GM and responded eventually. I wonder if he will reply to this, and tell me if I've got anything wrong.
He has so far refused to give the Welsh Assembly, the FSA or county council enforcement officers the facts.
That means we can't tell if he is a farmer or a faker, or maybe both. Only Mr Harrington knows, and he's not saying.

milking it

2009-02-04T09:45:07Z

It's National Dairy Week, so it's time to be told that 98% of homes in the UK have dairy foods in the fridge. The ones that don't are presumably allergic to dairy products or hardline vegans.
And things have moved on so well in the British food industry that our friends at the trade association Dairy UK can assure us that the vast majority of the dairy products in our fridges will be made in the UK from British milk. How things have changes over the last 30 years.

Back then you couldn't buy Carmarthenshire butter in Carmarthenshire. Butter came from New Zealand and came with a health warning from partial scientific research, which warmed of high cholesterol and persuaded millions to switch to reconstituted industrial chemical grease in their sarnies. probably made from otherwise inedible oil grown in former rain forests by starving slaves. Yoghurt came from Germany and your cheese from Canada.
Now Britain has more named cheeses than the French, some of the highest quality fresh milk in the world and a huge array of yoghurts. Dairy produce may come differently in other countries, but it doesn't come any better.
It's partly down to consumer demand, so well done us. But it's also down to farmers determined to meet falling income by adding value to their produce. The organic sector must also take some credit, along with innovative individuals, both from old established farming families and among newcomers to the country turning their backs on unfulfilling lives in the cities.
However, and why ever it happened, it's a good moment to celebrate the transformation in the contents of our fridges.

the price of food

2009-01-22T10:43:14Z

It's a funny time for farmers. Milk processors are once again cutting the farmgate price after a few short months when it approached profitability for farm enterprises.

But livestock market prices are the highest for years. This is seen as one effect of thw weak Pound. Unfortunately for all farmers, another effect is a steep rise in the price of feed and fertiliser, although at least the cost of fuel has levelled off after thge heights of the autumn.
The market place has been praised by successive UK governments since the days of Thatcher as being the ruler of the economy, and farmers are at the mercy of the price they are offered - while of course the consumer in turn is at the mercy of the price that is fixed. A quick glance at the chasm between the prices paid to the producer and that paid by the customer is enough to tell you that the middlemen, the supermarket giants who control the system, are making a hefty mark-up. And so they should, they might say: they take the risk, though not perhaps, with 100% of us needing to eat and therefore to buy it somewhere, as great a risk as the producer dealing with the climate, the weather, disease and those fixed prices for essentials.
At least one thing is changing. For decades farmers have been hated for receiving subsidies designed to ensure a secure food supply and keep prices low. Now subsidies are being slashed and the focus is more on banks and other financial companies who are being given incredible amounts of money in a grand taxpayer bail-out with no strings attached. They don't even have to produce anything. Suddenly the market place, the great golden calf of modern economics, has been toppled from its plinth. But only for the money-go-round, that noble calling that makes the rich richer and leaves the poor to beg on the street. As for farmers, the message from the top is unchanged: get on with it, stop moaning and give us cheap food.

UK Environment Minister Phil Woolas says the anti GM lobby has just one year to put up its arguments.

2008-09-26T08:35:20Z

No doubt it will do so, but it does beg the question: where has he been? The answer, of course, is that he's been sat around a table with representatives of the companies that are trying to sell the stuff.

Consumers across Europe are overwhlemingly opposed to GM material in their food, although of course they probably eat it every time them buy anything containing maize, soya or soya lecithin.

Farmers on the other hand don't want to rule out anything that holds the promise of higher crop yields or drought, pest or disease resistance - the very things that the GM seed companies proclaim as the ultimate goal of their science.

Unfortunately none of these are available and there are few signs that any company is developing them.
We've already shot down the canard that GM can feed the world: only those with money can afford to eat, whether the food is GM or not.

What about the wider issue? As former EU Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler told delegates attending an international congress of agricultural journalists in Graz earlier this month: "One should distinguish between biotechnology as a concept and the applications that we have seen so far."

So far the GM companies have cynically exploited the technology to build in resistance to their own chemical weedkillers. That might boost sales of Roundup, but why would consumers want to eat food that's been sprayed with even more toxic substances?

However, as Dr Fischler said, it would be "a huge mistake" if we did not invest in research and development in genetic modification.

If GM could increase crop yields - though there's no sign of that yet - and if it could offer drought,pest and disease resistance, it could be useful for biomass or biofuel production even if the necessary research - not yet carried out - shows that it could cause damage to human disgestive systems.

That's a lot of maybes, a lot of ifs and buts. And it's a long way from Phil Wollas's apparent knowledge and understanding of the issue. Time for some homsework Mr Woolas - and might we suggest a little less time cosying up to commercial interests.

There may not be a more important industry in the world than farming. But you wouldn't think so, to judge from the priority afforded it by successive governments at Westminster.

2008-08-27T09:27:52Z

The shambles of the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic, the complacency about exotic animal pests and diseases on our borders and the ill-considered alacrity with which Ministers here endorse hair-brained bureacratic missives from Brussels that other EU states refuse to have anything to do with add up to an administration that thinks it's OK for some other country to grow our food.
The absurd hunting with hounds legislation and the way the Government has cosied up to the biotech multinationals whose only aims is to control global production of the five staple crops and make stacks of cash for themselves and their shareholders are further evidence of a complete lack of nous at Westminster.
While farmers have been knocked about by policies formulated by politicians who think the countryside is somewhere to relax, bureaucracy has mushroomed. There are move clipboard-bearing regulators than ever before roaming the country checking up on this and that in the name of safe food and framing while somehow failing to spot the disease virus flushed down a laboratory drain or hitching a rise on an imported animal or on meat shipped in from countries with endemic livestock disease.
Jim Callaghan was the last Prime Minister who knew anything at all about farming, and the last few UK farming ministers - who not even called that any more - have been scientists or, in the case of the present incumbant, someone who studied Russia and Eastern Europe at university before becoming a professional politician and rsearch officer with Britain's fifth largest trade union - Manufacturing, Science, Finance. His only link with the countryside is his garden. Having said that, everyone agrees he is better than the truily awful Margaret Becket.
Our one consolation in Wales is that we have a Minister who was born and raised on a farm and actually studied economics, spent four years as a Researcher in Agricultural Economics in Aberystwyth and then worked as an economic development officer for the Development Board for Rural Wales and later for the Welsh Development Agency. Whether you agree with her policies or not, at least she brings some knowledge and experience to the post.

Prince Charles seems to have sparked a new debate about GM food.

2008-08-19T16:55:44Z

In fact it wasn't him at all. It was UK Environment Minister Phil Woolas who started it all. He emerged from a meeting with a delagation from the eight multinational companies who are busily trying to sell their inventions to a sceptical European public to say it was time to reopen the debate.
Why? Because GM crops have the potential to feed the world. This is arrant nonsense for two principle reasons. The first is that people are not hungry because there is not enough food in the world They are hungry because they don't have the money to buy it.
Secondly both the UN, through a study by 400 - that's four hundred - independent scientists, and the US Department of Agriculture (in a country where tonnes of the stuff is grown) say there is no evidence that GM crops produce bigger yields. In fact, in some cases yields are reduced.
The agenda promoted by the GM companies is not to feed the world. It is to control the seeds that farmers need to grow the food that feeds those of us lucky enough to be able to buy it. Those who control the food we eat control the world.
I'll no doubt return to the theme of GM in future blogs.

culling squirrels

2008-06-25T09:33:44Z

To some people they are cuddly creatures that can become tame enough to nibble endearingly out of your hand. But to people who feed wild birds in their gardens, grey squirrels are crafty and acrobatic thieves. And to the native British red squirrel they simply mean extinction.
But there was another reason I spent £30 on a squirrel trap this spring. Almost every time I went into my chicken shed a squirrel shot out through the door or a hole at the top of the stone wall - since blocked. I was fed up enough with them stealing from the wild birds' winter rations, let alone eating their fill of the expensive organic mixed corn and pellets we feed our chickens.

I caught three, donned a tough pair of gloves to protect my hands from their vicious bite. and dispatched them to a better place. I later learned I had done the right thing. Anyone trappijng a grey squirrel is legally obliged to kill it.
My wife Janet suggested acting humanely and setting them loose somewhere else, but I didn't want to visit the pests on anyone, and I know there are red squirrels in nearby Brechfa forest, clinging on in the face of the of what my daughter describes as the North American tree rat.
The grey squirrel was introduced to this country in the 1880s from North America, and is the only squirrel many people have ever seen. It is now on the UN list of the hundred most invasive species and has been a disaster for the native red, because the grey carries a pox that kills the red.
Reds are now restricted to pitifully few parts of Britain, including Anglesey, where a concerted programme of culling greys has lifted a severely endangered population that numbered only 40 in 1998.
The RSCPA thinks culling grey squirrel is unethical. Once again Britain's largest animal charity is unable to see the wider implications of allowing pests and predators to multiply without restraint. Treating destructive wildlife as cuddly animals might win friends among a population largely ignorant of rural ways. But it's not ethical to stand aside and watch the extinction of a native species.
The government-funded Red Squirrel Protection Project, a last-ditch effort to save the red squirrel in north-east England, has trapped and killed 17,800 since December, 2006, and come up with an answer to the disposal problem: eat them. It apparently tastes sweet, like a cross between lamb and duck. Maybe I'll try it some time.

badgers

2008-04-09T08:17:53Z

They certainly know how to badger a girl, both sides in the argument over Mr Brock's involvement in the epidemic of bovine tuberculosis that is sweeping through parts of rural Wales.
Rural Affairs Minister Elin Jones has bitten the bullet and ordered a cull of badgers in an as yet undefined bTB hotspot.

She is responding to the advice that emerged from a special inquiry by the Welsh Assembly rather than the rather more strident opinions from the opposing camps.
The farm unions tell her they can't see the point of having their own sick animals slaughtered while the virus is left to spread unfettered through wildlife. And they say it is cruel to leave the badger to suffer a painful and lingering death, an outcast from the sett.
And the badger's supporters say it's all down to poor animal husbandry. Cattle - and badgers - are infected by other cattle. The badger is the innocent "sacrificial" victim, stretched out on the altar of expediency by an administration sucking up to the farm unions.
Science, in its usual inexact fashion, can be interpreted according to the eye of the beholder. Different experts have different views on the value of culling badgers. Either side can qujite whichever one they wish.
Observers like myself can understand both points of view. I don't know whether a cull of badgers will make any difference, but I do know that bTB was almost eradicated after World War Two by a combination of rigorous control of both cattle and badger.
The problem resurfaced gradually after those controls were lifted and the badger became a protected species. I remember a distinguished vet predicting back in the mid-1980s that bTB would reach epidemic proportions.
I also believe that the disease was spread rapidly by cattle movements after the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 when farmers restocked, many from the South-West of England where bTB was already a problem. No pre-movement bTB tests were required.
In addition methinks Mr Brock's supporters protest too much. They are right to say that in some cases bTB can be blamed on animal husbandry. Cooping up cattle in sheds provides good conditions for the virus to take hold.
But it is absurd to say that the disease NEVER passes from badger to cattle. And as for the line about sacrificial victim for political purposes, ordering a cull of badgers is politically brave and will adversely affect the Minister who ordered it. Elin Jones might win friends amongst some farmers, but she has forfeited a great deal of support as well.
She has also widened the gap between town and country. Farmers already have a low standing amongst those who think food grows on the supermarket shelf. The cull will deepen their prejudice.
Hardly anyone will take any notice of the other measures that Ms Jones introduced yesterday - annual testing of all cattle, linking compensation to good animal husbandry, increased biosecurity rules, swifter removal of infected cattle and so on.
And the truth is that no-one, not even Ms Jones, knows whether culling badgers will make any difference, however much either side in the argument insists one way or the other.

double standards

2008-03-26T14:13:55Z

It's not what you spend, it's who you are that matters when it comes to accounting for taxpayers' money.
The news that the European Commission has decided to publish the full details and postcodes of all farmers in receipt of the Single Farm Payment comes as the House of Commons takes legal action, using taxpayers' money, to prevent publication of similar details of MPs expenses.

We already know that MPs from outside London can buy themselves a house on tax-free expenses and keep the proceeds when they sell it. We know they can claim £400 a month for groceries and buy stacks of furniture for fixed amounts - all without having to bother with producing receipts.
They're slacking if they don't chalk up about £60,000 in tax-free expenses. No wonder it took three years to get these details out of them.
Farmers have had a bad press for years for taking advantage of the cash available to them, but at least they produce food.
Most MPs on the other hand are little more than vote fodder, herded through the lobby like sheep at the behest of their cynical party machines, nodding sagaciously at the fairness of loading more and more costs onto farmers and washing their hands of the mess they make over foot-and-mouth disease.

one union

2008-03-05T14:02:00Z

The National Farmers Union celebrates its centenary this year and in Wales that will mean a black tie dinner in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on November 26 followed by a centenary conference the following day.
It's only three years since the rival Farmners Union of Wales celebrated its 50th year.

Successive Presidents of both bodies have revealed, sometimes unhelpfully at the end of their term of office, that their big regret is that they were unable to bring the two unions together.
The problem is hidebound opposition within both camps that effectively scupper any good intentions.
There is no longer any real reason for Welsh farmers to have two spokesmen at the top table when the industry comes under discussion.
The reason the FUW broke away was a feeling that the country was marginalised by an NFU then dominated by large scale, often arable, farmers to the detriment of the traditional Welsh family farm.
NFU Cymru is now effectively an autonymous body, able to address independently the particulars of Welsh agriculture, which are becoming more distinct from the rest of the UK as the National Assembly increasingly makes its own decisions.
The continued existence of two bodies is now a disadvantage. Some farmers belong to both bodies, which doubles the cost of representations, while at the negotiating table the industry's voice is inevitable weakened by being divided.
Perhaps those who remain adamant in their opposition to a united front have good reasons for continuing to block moves to bring the two sides together. Perhaps they really feel that Welsh farmers would be disadvantaged by a single representative body
The fear is that they are motivated by the same bitter feelings that besmirched the face of farmikng in Wales for years after the FUW broke away in 1955.

let them eat money

2007-11-20T13:24:16Z

It might seem the fairest thing in the world to make farmers pay towards the cost of clearing up animal and bird disease like foot-and-mouth, bluetongue, avian flu, swine fever and bovine tuberculosis.
After all, as we're told so often, the polluter pays. It's their animals or birds that get ill. Why should that poor overburdened individual, the taxpayer, pick up the tab?

How unfortunate that Defra Secretary of State Hilary Benn should firm up the prospect of this happening in the middle of the Northern Rock affair, where it emerges that the poor old taxpayer has coughed up £24 billion to prop up a dead duck of a bank that carried on doing business when it was clear it was heading for the rocks. The prospect of Mr Taxpayer getting back his cash is remote indeed.
So here's the contrast: Having piled extra costs onto farmers to improve traceability, stop them burying fallen stock and increase biosecurity while removing all constraints on the virtual cartel operated by the main retailers (who are muscling the traditional smaller corner or village shop into history) so that they are at the mercy of unscrupulous price fixers, it's time to think about making them pay for diseases. These are diseases like foot-and-mouth, leaked from a shoddily maintained government-owned laboratory (with Ministers refusing to compensate a devastated industry), or bluetongue, brought by midges spreading northwards because of global warming, or bTB, where the government kills suspect cattle but refuses to apply the same remedy to tackle the reservoir of the disease in wildlife.
The one exception says much about the attitude of the authorities - £600,000 in compensation to bootiful big business Bernard Matthews who actually imported avian flu from the continent and brought the rest British poultry world to a standstill. The poultry industry came to a halt, but BM was up and running within days. The shoddy show must go on.
That last bit helps to explain why Northern Rock got £24bn - or by some accounts £40bn. Big business, and the production of money is what counts - that and protecting the assets of people who have so much to spare they can try to make more on the Footsie. Money and the people that make it are what matter. Food, and farmers must watch out for themselves. Don't say you haven't been warned.

women woo farmers

2007-11-07T17:22:13Z

Not so long ago Welsh farmers were horrified to find they had a woman exercising political control over their affairs - and a vegetarian at that.
In fact Christine Gwyther was not so much exercising control as trying hard to handle an extremely hot potato.

She had been hoiked into the job by Wales First Minister Alun Michael in much the same way that Mr Michael had been parachuted into Wales from his beloved Westminster by Tony Blair - anything to keep that Rhodri Morgan out of the job.
It was a painful time all round, watching civil servants trying hard not to let Ms Gwyther out of their sight and away from their hearing.
How much has changed. First Carwyn Jones arrived, a smooth operator and a straight talkers, who won grudging erly respect but then lost it. Carwyn himself admitted that the only reason he had the enormous portfolio of farming, planning, the environment, rural affairs and the cabinet electric kettle was because no one wanted it (farming). He lost his grip because he realised that getting too close to the farmers was not going to do his long term ambition to be First Minister any good at all - there are few votes for farming in the Welsh Labour Party.
Now fate and the need to cobble together a coalition of Plaid and Labour to create the One Wales Government have conspired to deliver anoher woman, a farmer's daughter no less, and farmers like what they see and hear.
Elin Jones has had a honeymoon, there's no doubt about that, and she prepares to visit the farm where she was brought up at Llanwnen, Llanybydder, on Thursday November 8 to meet a group of young farmers selling lamb direct to M&S, she is very much in their good books.
Her first rural affairs budget contains the first pot of cash aiming to eradicate bovine TB - eradicate, mark you, a word no one has ever used before, and that suggests she is bold enough to take on the powerful cuddly anthropomorphic wildlife animal lobby and order a cull of badgers.
There's also money to help young farmers to enter an industry that is becoming a closed shop because of its asset rich, income poor status.
It's only a start, and Elin Jones has a hold on the job as precarious as Plaid Cymru's cwtch-up with Labour, but so far she has shown that, perhaps for the first time, farmers have someone in the devolved government of Wales that really understands their industry and, more than that, really cares about it.

A thousand farmers

2007-10-24T08:12:10Z

When a leaking drainage pipe from a slurry store pollutes a stream or a river and causes off the fishes and invertebrate life for even a single kilometre the Environment Agency investigates and prosecutes and the farmer has to pay up thousands of pounds in fines and costs..
When a leaking drainage pipe from a laboratory handling seriously dangerous viruses pollutes the countryside, causes the deaths of thousands of animals, devastates the food industry and costs thousands of farmers thousands of pounds the Envirionment Agency does nothing.

That's one reason why a thousand farmers turned up for a mass meeting at the Royal Welsh Showground last night desperately worried about the crash in their incomes and wondering about things like double standards. What has happened to the principle that the polluter pays?
There's not much the farmers can do. The NFU is going to pursue a claim for damages from the laboratory owners, the government, but has been told that could take three years and a lot of money to drag its way through the courts.
Direct action will not lead anywhere. Brynle Williams was shouted at from the floor last night for calling off the fuel protest "too quickly" - that is, presumably, before the army was called in and the country descended into a real crisis.
Anyway the law has been changed. That couldn't happen again. Farmers could boycott the marketplace, but that would only succeed if everyone did it.
There's another meeting at Abergavenny on tomorrow. Get used to it. The industry has been in crisis for decades. There is no sign of it coming to an end.

militant farmers

2007-10-23T13:59:37Z

I felt like a country bumpkin today. I count myself fortunate that the straw did not drop from the corner of my mouth and that I did not keel over from the noxious fumes of Cardiff city centre.
It's not often I have to visit the Western Mail HQ, so this was my first encounter with the newly blocked roads of the city centre. I managed to make the meeting on time by luck rather than judgement, but had an unwanted tour of the environs on the way out.

Cardiff probably doesn't know this, and probably doesn't care either, but this must be one of the most unfriendly cities for a visitor by car - and ever since the transport system of Wales got decimated, that's about the only way the rest of Wales can access the coal port town that became our capital city five and a half decades ago.
It costs a fortune to park, once you're able to find somewhere, and quite frankly the shops are over-priced and over-rated.
But it's an education for those of us who spend most of our time blank-minded in the hopeless hills, unable to better ourselves enough to join the city sophisticates.
It's always interesting, too, to hear what the urbanites have to say about about farming and the countryside. I happened to mention the mass meeting called for tonight at the Royal Welsh Showground. "Farmers are feeling militant," I told a colleague. "Again," he replied."Why?" Having just returned from a short holiday in France, where I talked to a few farmers, it made me wonder whether he actually takes notice of what is going on outside those all-important city limits.
I suppose he was thinking of the fuel protest led by Brynle Williams, but as far as I remember from reporting it at the time, that involved at least as many if not more extremely disgruntled lorry drivers.
In the meantime farmers have been remarkably forbearing in the face of a government that seems to care more about the production of money for people who already have rather a lot than the production of food in a world rapidly approaching a food shortage.
Farmers have consistently been treated with contempt (recent Welsh ministers excepting), so it's no wonder that the same Brynle that led the fuel protest told the organiser of tonight's mass meeting that he was playing with fire because the mood among farmers was so strong.
It remains to be seen whether anything dramatic emerges from tonight's meeting. I suspect we may see a delegation to London, or even a protest march or tractor ride. Watch this space......