David's Digest

Last night's Channel 4 TV programme "The Great Golbal Warming Swindle" turned everything we have recently heard about climate change on its head. According to several scientists from around the world those who blame carbon emissions for the rise in temperatures have got it wrong.
Its not carbon dioxide that causes global warming, say these intellectuals, but sun spots. When these cause temperatures to rise emissions of carbon increase. So the politically motivated scientists who say different are promoting the opposite of the real facts. Moreover. they are using these spurious arguments as an excuse to raise taxes and inhibit development in the Third World. Or so said the climatologists who appeared on Channel 4 last night.
Even the founder of Green Peace, who resigned several years ago when his colleagues started exaggerating things in order to continue confrontation with the establishment, agreed with them.
Meanwhile politicians are meeting in Brussels to try to agree yet another EU action plan to deal with the received wisdom that most people have come to accept.

A week ago as I dragged my feet through mud while rain ran off my cap down the back of my neck I commented to a colleague that it would be two or three weeks before we would be able to get on the land. But suddenly it's Spring. The sun has shone for the last few days and yesterday and today temperature's here in Norfolk have been around 19 degrees C. Recently saturated dark brown land has whitened over and the air has filled with the sound of tractors preparing seed beds.
On this farm it so happens that most of our spring drillings of beans and sugar beet are scheduled for our heaviest and therefore slowest drying fields, so a bit of patience is called for to avoid compaction. But we've applied first top dressings of nitrogen onto the latest drilled fields of winter wheat and we've done the oil seed rape as well. If this weather holds we'll be spring seed drilling very shortly.
Oh, silly me. In my old fashioned habit of thinking about production agriculture, I nearly forgot. The environment is what they want us to look after most these days, isn't it? Thankfully I've always been a closet environmentalist so it's no hardship.
Anyway the buds are bursting, the birds are singing and the primroses on the banks are blooming. All seems well with the world. What a difference a week makes.

I used to love walking around the farm in spring. I still do if I am honest but the enjoyment of seeing winter sown crops grow, spring sown crops germinate and spring flowers emerging along ditches and banks is tempered these days by the detritus left by fly tippers.
I don't know how bad it is in other area's because I only walk this farm in detail. But the amount and variety of rubbish left in gateways and on roadside banks around here seems to increase annually. When the hedge cutter has tidied up last years growth and before this years has had time to sprout and cover up some of the evidence the mess looks worse than ever.
This year we have had tyres of all sizes, matresses, cupboards, heaps of tin cans, a calor gas cylinder, refrigerators, TV sets, garden rubbish of various sorts and on a neighbouring farm someone even tipped a load of gravel part way across a lane so that traffic had to drive up the opposite bank to pass. The Council even brought cones to surround it so that cars would not drive into it in the dark. But did they clear up any of the above? Good gracious no, that's down to local farmers.

The man who used to be "the next President of the United States", his joke, not mine, is speaking in Cambridge (UK) today and tomorrow. Inevitably his subject is "An Inconvenient Truth" the video on global warming which, a few weeks ago, won the man in question - Al Gore -an Oscar for the best factual film of the year.
As I suggested a couple of weeks ago it may not yet be certain that carbon emissions from human activity is the main culprit. Certainly there is an influential group of scientists around the world who dispute that analysis.
But even they concede that something is happening to the climate. It's just whether or not we can do anything about it.
Either way Gore's message is hard hitting and stark in it's warning of the consequences. I bought a copy of the DVD the other day (from our local Virgin record store) and have just viewed it. Gore concludes the film with the actions he believes should be taken to avoid catastrophe, although reports suggest he does not follow his own advice all that closely.

I am so angry I can hardly contain myself. I can only hope blogging about what has just happened relieves some of the stress I am feeling and stops me bursting.
I was driving a tractor and seedbed maker on one of our roadside fields when I noticed a pick-up truck stop in a gateway. I and my tractor were several hundred yards away so the occupants of the vehicle probably discounted any possibility that anyone would see them. As it was I was much too distant to read the registration number.
Anyway, the passenger got out of the pick-up and climbed onto the back. At which point the other occupant slowly drove down the lane. As he did so the one on the back began throwing lumps of what I later discovered were bits of broken concrete, probably the remains of a patio - onto the grass banks on either side of the lane. Altogether there were about twenty of these lumps. The whole episode took only a minute or so.
I headed across the field as fast as I could to try to stop the vehicle. But before I could get there, or even close enough to get the number, they saw me coming and shot away at speed. And I am left with yet another lot of other peoples rubbish to clear up.
It will have to wait until spring drilling is finished - we don't have the time or the manpower to do it earlier.
I am still seething that people, and they must be local, can behave in such an anti social, irresponsible and unenvironmental way. The whole situation is virtually out of control and if I did manage to catch them I would be tempted to take the law into my own hands rather than wait for anything official to happen. But the litter louts are usually clever enough not to get caught. Meanwhile I apologise for blogging on the same subject in such a short time. I will now go and sit in a dark room and try to calm down.

Our Farm Open Day pack arrived today. You must have seen it advertised. Farm Sunday, June 10th. The idea is to attract local people to have a look round farms in their area and for farmers, their families and workers to give them a guided tour. And the pack I referred to contains blank advertising posters that can be filled in with the farm address and opening times, signs for directing traffic, a Tshirt with an Open Farm logo, and bigger signs for the farmyard indicating the wide support the initiative enjoys.
One of those supporters is, of course, Farmers Weekly. Others include Natural England, the HGCA, the NFU, Country Living magazine, MacDonalds, and LEAF, whose idea it was in the first place. I say that with some pride because although Open Sunday is an initiative that happened after I left the LEAF chair it is totally consistent with everything I tried to do while there and I congratulate the current management on it.
But if the farming industry is to gain maximum benefit in terms of its public relations it must be supported by farmers themselves. Its really not a huge commitment. The sponsors will supply you with almost all you need - apart from a few hours of your time. Surely its worth that to earn a good name in the parish and help push concept of local food for local people.
Contact LEAF for further details: www.leafuk.org or 024 7641 3911. Please!

The combination of rising world population, increasing demand from some developing countries and global warming will lead to food shortages and sharp increases in its cost to consumers. Now where have I read that before? Oh, I remember. I wrote it myself about ten years ago and many other commentators have said something similar in the meantime.
But this week Prof. Bill McKelvey of the Scottish Agricultural College has said it again and suddenly the BBC and others have begun to take notice. It's not that he said anything very different and I do not intend that in any cynical way. But as an academic he is considered as impartial - unlike people like me. Even more relevant is that the public mood has changed, especially towards global warming, and suddenly the popular media is taking it seriously.
Pronouncements by other world renowned academics have helped. Jeffery Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, USA, for instance.

Shanghai must be one of the most exciting cities in the world if you are urban based, into industrial development and want to make lots of money. Let us ignore global warming air pollution and labour exploitation, for the moment, for the purposes of this blog.
It was, anyway, somewhat surprising for the Farmers Weekly Farm Study Tour to be told they were to see one of China's most forward looking horticultural facilities in the city's northern suburbs. But there, among sprawling industrial estates, we found the Sun Qiao Modern Agricultural Development Area.
Extending to only a handful of hectares it seemed to be a cross between a research centre, a demonstration unit and a commercial operation. But it was, as it said on the label, one of the most modern agri/horti/enterprises we had seen in two weeks of touring the country. There were modern greenhouses with automated atmosphere control, hydroponic production and advanced plant cloning techniques. We could almost have been in Holland or Japan. Moreover, the centre regularly attracts experts from those countries to guide them in their research and techniques.

My sincere congratulations to American writer Bill Bryson on being nominated as President of the CPRE. I was a fan of his travel and other books long before he moved to South Norfolk. Since he has lived here I have had a number of opportunities to talk to him about his love of the English countryside and there is no doubt it is genuine. Moreover, he has chosen to live in this country rather than the USA because he enjoys it so much. What saddens him, however, is that too many native Brit's fail to appreciate the beauty around them and are all to ready to abuse it.
Accordingly, the CPRE President Elect has declared that his main focus will be fly tipping in the countryside. It may be that part of his motivation for this has been the filth and rubbish he has seen tipped on our gateways and roadside banks - rubbish that at busy times we sometimes struggle to clear. That the local district council also often fails to clear that element of the mess that it should deal with helps not at all.
I have told Bill Bryson that I will support his proposed campaign wholeheartedly. I have also told him that success will not be easy. Unfortunately, the people who indulge in fly tipping are probably not readers of his books nor do they share his love of the countryside. If they did they would surely stop doing it.

I am in danger of becoming a one trick pony on fly tipping. But I cannot listen to David Milibands plans to fine householders if they fail to recycle properly or if they over-fill their rubbish bins without pointing out, once again, the implications. Such a policy assumes Britain consists of upright law abiding citizens who feel responsible for the environment and are enthusiastic to do all they can to reduce waste. Sorry, that is not the case.
Maybe the people our DEFRA Secretary of State mixes with and a percentage of other middle class householders will comply with his new law and happily pay any fine levied if they are unable to do so. However, the reality is that many people believe they pay far too much council tax already in return for which they receive inadequate services. Such people will avoid paying fines by doing whatever they feel they have to do and they do not even regard disposing of their rubbish in the countryside or elsewhere as a crime.
As has already been suggested they may, if they live in large metropolitan areas, dump their excess in someone elses bin. And if they live close to countryside they will take it at dead of night and dump it in farmers gateways.
It is happening already and will get worse, much worse, if Miliband's proposals become law. Think again David.

There was a green theme running through the 176th Suffolk Show which I visited today. Together with the County Council the Show Association launched a campaign to make Suffolk the greenest county. And there was a stand explaining all the little things people can do that could, collectively, bring this about.
Closer to farmers pocket books was a major exhibition promoting local food and urging consumers to consider the food miles involved in imported foods. The stand contained nuggets of information that might persuade them to change their buying habits.
For instance, it was stated that according to DEFRA the distance UK food travelled increased by 15% between 1992 and 2002 with obvious implications for the emission of greenhouse gases and global warming. Information on the stand also explained how the food trade gap between what we import and what we export had more than doubled in ten years as British farmers contribution to the national diet had declined.
Consumers were urged to look more closely at country of origin labels and choose what to buy accordingly. They were advised to eat home grown food in season; to use farmers own shops and markets; to look up local food producers on the internet.

Maybe its the farms selected for the FW study tour to visit in Germany but almost every one seems to be producing energy or the commodities from which it can be produced. First there was the dairy farmer who turned his cow slurry into methane then burned it to produce electricity. Then there was the man who was crushing rape seed and selling the resulting oil to a refiner who converted it into bio-deisel. The cake bi product also still contained some oil residues and this was used for domestic heating. The same man had a couple of electicity generating windmills although he was less happy with them because the site chosen had turned out to have insufficient wind, despite having had a test rig erected for a few months prior to installing them.
But the most exciting and probably most successful example we have seen was the farm where maize silage was being used as a direct feedstock for the production of methane with no livestock involved. To us this was real groundbreaking stuff and it appeared to be working more
profitably and more reliably than any of the other alternatives.

A 228 page report, commissioned by the government and out today, warns that illegal fly tipping will almost double if "pay as you throw" charges for rubbish collection or dumping at official sites are introduced.

What a surprise! I could have told them that - indeed I did tell them that - in blogs and FW articles several months ago when the charging scheme was first floated. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax payers money have been paid to the environmental consultants, Eunomia, to confirm what was already blindingly obvious.

For what it's worth, Eunomia said the charges would lead to a huge increase in the amount of refuse being dumped in lay-bys, neighbours bins and the countryside and that this would add £39mill to the national cost of cleaning it up. Eunomia also confirmed that there was a doubling of flytipping between 2004/5 and 2005/6.

Ministers appear to labour under the illusion that everyone in this country cares and has a concience about such matters and will obey the law and pay whatever is charged when they say so. Sorry, but a substantial minority do not. Yet more proof, I'm afraid , that politicians and civil servants don't live in the real world in which many people will try to get away without paying their debt to society if they think they can. And in most cases they do.

Better policing and more prosecutions might help a little. But free collection from the roadside (paid for from public funds in lieu of saving clear-up costs like those suggested above) is the only way such anti-social individuals might change their ways. As todays report implies, "fining" them would simply make matters worse. The government must think again.

A farming friend sent  me the following email over the weekend. Neither he nor I wish it to be thought of as a slur on any religion. But it does seem to fit current climatic aberations that are playing havoc with harvest.

In deference to The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Commission for Political Correctness it has just been announced that weather conditions in the UK may no longer be referred to as "The British Weather".

In future it should be referred to as "Muslim Weather" - partly Sunni but mostly Shi'ite.

An article in todays Daily Telegraph under the by-line of one Jon Swaine informs readers that wood pigeons visit gardens more than robins. I don't know about you but I could have told them that without the expense of a British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) survey.

The piece then goes on to claim that pigeons have been "driven from the countryside by intensive farming" and attracted to urban and suburban gardens by bird feeders. If only!

The probability is that the 16,500 people who contributed to the survey were sitting in urban gardens as they did their count; that few, if any, of them actually went beyond the city limits to see what was happening on farmers fields. They then concluded, eroneously, that the increased numbers they were seeing in their gardens were refugees from farming systems.

Not only is their assessment demonstrably inaccurate (come and see for yourselves if you don't believe me) but they have also used it to take yet another unjustified swipe at our industry.

If the BTO and other bird agencies would like more pigeons in their city gardens and can find a feed to place on their bird tables that would be more attractive to them than my rape, I would encourage them to spread it around as widely as possible. Sadly, I doubt if that feed exists. For out here in the countryside we too have millions more pigeons and I would dearly love to significantly reduce their numbers. 

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Yes, we had an inch or two (sorry - a few millimeters) of snow here yesterday morning. But by mid afternoon the flurries had turned to rain and most of it disappeared. A few stupid motorists who presumably thought they should be able to turn corners at the same speed as they normally do ended up skidding off un-gritted highways. But it really wasn't bad enough to close schools, curtail train and bus services and so on.

I must concede that conditions were worse in the far south east (as shown on TV news bulletins and reported by FW colleagues). That meant, of course, that the London-centric mass media assumed the whole country was the same. But it wasn't. Indeed, although we had a sharp frost here in Norfolk last night and the lanes were pretty slippery to start with, since then the sun has come out and I was tempted just now to go out into the garden to sunbathe. Fortunately for anyone who might have been watching I resisted the temptation. Global Warming continues here in the balmy east of the country.

But I do think we have become a nation of wimps. How we would cope if we had snowfalls and low temperatures like they do in Canada, the Alps, Russia, etc I don't know. Its time to toughen up - not allow ourselves to be ruled forever by Health and Safety legislation. Let's make Britain Great again and begin by facing up to and beating a bit of bad weather.

Its old news now, having happened two days ago, but since then we've had a series of power outages because of exploding transformers and so on and I have been unable to find time in the office when the electricity was live to report it to you. It seems settled now so here goes.

On Monday evening at about six o'clock, after we had been waiting for forecast thunder storms all day, the sky clouded over, lightning began to flash all around us and the associated thunder got nearer and nearer. Suddenly the rain began and came down in sheets. Roofs in the farm buildings and farmhouse were tested to the limit and later we discovered some leaks. Surface water flooded drains unable to cope with the volume and the farm drive was like a river. I didn't venture out to look at the crops but when I did I counted myself lucky that we did not appear to have any damage apart from flooded patches in low lying areas. Those patches are still flooded today. It takes a while for 33mm falling in an hour to disappear.

But I didn't realise just how lucky we had been. Less than a quarter of a mile from three big fields of our sugar beet and a fifty acre block of wheat a swathe of hail cut crops to smitherines. Barley ears were cut off and smashed to the ground; wheat seemed to stand up a bit better but ended up bruised and bent; sugar beet leaves were mashed to a pulp. The beet will prabably recover but not without serious loss of yield and sugar. The cereals are too close to harvest and too badly damaged to allow anything other than a salvage operation, come harvest.

I'm not sure if the victims of this carnage were insured. If they were they will be making sizeable claims. If they were not they face a much reduced return on the affaected fields. We haven't had anything like this in Norfolk for years.

Given my past (and ongoing) affiliations with LEAF their stand was one that I was bound to visit when I attended Cereals yesterday. Their presence was small but as lively as ever and I was really pleased to hear that once again well over 400 UK farms will be inviting the public in to have a look round next Sunday, June 13th - Open Farm Sunday - which it initiated..

I was even more thrilled to learn that all four Defra ministers will be visiting an Open Farm that day. One member of the previous team turned up at a few past Open Sundays. But all four is unprecendented. Furthermore, I gather top civil servants in the department have also been urged by their new political masters to visit the farm nearest to where they live.

OK its just support and its not much needed money. But it must be a sign that the new administration appreciates what LEAF is doing - promoting the production of safe wholesome food at affordable prices while at the same time trying to enhance the environment - and it will surely inspire more farmers to follow that path while vindicating the efforts of the small but dedicated LEAF team. Well done you lot.