Up Countrytag:,2008:/3672008-04-09T09:49:41ZAn insider's view of Welsh rural lifeMovable Type 3.31badgerstag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2008://367.437162008-04-09T09:17:53Z2008-04-09T09:49:41ZThey 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...Steve Dube
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 standardstag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2008://367.423822008-03-26T14:13:55Z2008-03-26T14:35:19ZIt'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...Steve Dube
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 uniontag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2008://367.405902008-03-05T14:02:00Z2008-03-05T14:23:12ZThe 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...Steve Dube
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 moneytag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2007://367.309302007-11-20T13:24:16Z2008-04-03T13:01:28ZIt 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,...Steve Dube
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 farmerstag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2007://367.297442007-11-07T17:22:13Z2007-11-07T17:40:32ZNot 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...Steve Dube
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 farmerstag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2007://367.284202007-10-24T09:12:10Z2007-10-24T09:36:12ZWhen 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...Steve Dube
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 farmerstag:upcountry.welshblogs.co.uk,2007://367.283712007-10-23T14:59:37Z2007-10-23T15:35:29ZI 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...Steve Dube
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......