Farming

What some people seem to forget is that Owen Paterson wasn’t (and Liz Truss isn’t) just Environment Secretary. As well as having responsibility for the environment, the role also covers food, fisheries and rural affairs. Paterson was one of the few people in Government that many farmers thought of as being ‘on their side’. As Secretary of State at Defra, he always appeared to have the interests of the rural community and the countryside at the centre of his decisions. As Melissa Kite argues in her cover piece this week, Cameron appears to have given in to ‘the animal rights lot’. As she rightly says, ‘They wanted Owen Paterson’s head

If you were concerned about animal welfare, would you choose to spend money on prosecuting farmers whose welfare is below par? Or would you spend that money on improving animal welfare through regular unannounced farm inspections, and the labeling of meat that has met strict welfare standards? There seems to be a split in the RSPCA, and it’s this farming issue that’s causing all the trouble. At their latest annual meeting the charity’s members voted to support a motion which would see them increase their prosecutions of farmers and slaughterhouse workers, and abandon their current Freedom Food accreditation scheme, according to minutes leaked to The Times. And it wasn’t just

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. At least not very much. The notion, apparently scandalous, that the Great British food market is being contaminated – sorry, infiltrated – by meat slaughtered according to traditional religious practices is the most #MiddleClassProblem of the year. I mean, you know it’s serious when Waitrose is in the dock. Waitrose! Now I can see that there is a case for requiring meat slaughtered without the animal being stunned to be labelled as such. But, as Melanie McDonagh concedes, the proportion of livestock slaughtered in this fashion is tiny. Perhaps 10% of sheep but only 3% of cattle and 4% of poultry. A reasonable person

How can we encourage children to be closer to nature, when 80% of Britons live in urban areas? This is the question that Michael Gove attempts to answer in his contribution to a recent pamphlet entitled ‘What the Environment means to Conservatives’. He writes, ‘One way we all interact with the natural world is through the food we eat.’ As a result, he wants to apply this thinking to education. He has already made cooking compulsory in schools for all children up to the age of 14 from next September. And his ‘School Food Plan’ aims both to improve the standard of school food, and to teach pupils about where ingredients

The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose population is being decimated by poaching. But his advisers should have been quicker to dissuade him from one aspect of his campaign: the threat to dispose of his grandmother’s ivory collection. That Africa’s elephant population is in peril from poachers is not in doubt. Of a total of 400,000 living in the wild, around 50,000 were illegally killed last year, way beyond the numbers which the population could naturally withstand. The future is looking bleak, too, for wild rhino, 1,000 of which were poached in Africa last year out of

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing – or next to nothing – to soak up the rain, water and silt

When it emerged that there was horsemeat in cheap burgers, some people thought it might spark a revolution in the British meat industry. Now that the public are more aware of the ins and outs of it all – the complicated and murky supply chains, the potential drug contamination, the images of badly-wrapped frozen meat – perhaps cheap meat would lose its attraction. But it doesn’t seem to have done so. Despite the stories about sales of game meat soaring and of people going back to basics and cooking from scratch, sales of processed meats such as sausages and burgers are still booming – both in the UK and abroad.

Would England be the same without the sight of sheep grazing on its ‘green and pleasant land’? Most likely not; but, then again, that might not be a bad thing. That is George Monbiot’s view. Spectator readers will already know what Monbiot thinks of the humble sheep. Last summer he wrote about how we ‘pay billions to service a national obsession with sheep, in return for which the woolly maggots kindly trash the countryside’. ‘Britain’, he wrote, ‘is being shagged by sheep’. BBC Countryfile took up the subject of sheep hill farming (Monbiot’s chief bugbear) on Sunday night. This method of farming has its fair share of controversies. For starters,

I’m off to Balcombe this weekend. In fact I might even carry a placard and paint my face with a clever pun, like ‘F*** off!’ or ‘Go f*** yourself.’ Because it’s time to add my voice in opposition to a greedy industry which threatens your ground-water, exudes greenhouse gases, leaches chemicals into the earth, destroys the beauty of the landscape and imperils our native fauna and flora wherever its grasping hand is felt. This extractive activity fills the air with noxious smells and clogs the roads with slow-moving vehicles; its safety record is appalling, with a high rate of work-related injuries and famously low worker pay. Moreover it has been shown to

Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere.

The section of the A83 that runs between Loch Long and Loch Fyne in western Scotland is known as the Rest and Be Thankful. It would be better described as the Get the Hell out of Here. For this, as far as I can tell, is the British trunk road most afflicted by landslips. The soil on the brae above the road is highly unstable. There have been six major slips since 2007, which have shut the road for a total of 34 days. The cost of these closures is estimated at about £290,000 a year. It’s a minor miracle that no one has yet been killed. The Scottish government

What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA? The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken any pleasure in poor, sweet, bushy-tailed Mr Nutkin’s death. This was the mistake made by Defra secretary of state Owen ‘Butcher’ Paterson, who was revealed over the weekend to have upset visiting Tory colleagues by showing pictures of himself cheerfully posing with the decapitated victims of his Kania 2000 squirrel traps. ‘I’m not sure what

David Frum offers a useful caution politicians might heed. Amidst the stupidity and vanity of politics it’s occasionally worth remembering that government is an impossible business. It is much like George Kennan’s description of the hazards faced by even weekend farmers: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbour comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven’t kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the