More from Ian Ashbridge at this year's Sentry conference
What is it about the RSPB that raises such passions among farmers? No sooner had Mark Avery, director of conservation at the RSPB, finished addressing this year’s Sentry conference, than he faced a personal attack from one of his organisation’s own members.
Lord de Ramsey pulled no punches when he called Dr Avery’s conference speech “patronising” and “dishonest”. Dr Avery’s account of arable performance and farmland bird numbers at the RSPB’s own Hope Farm near Cambridge, took no account of farm profitability, the biggest driver for commercial arable units, Lord de Ramsey said. He also challenged Dr Avery that many key species were in any decline, pointing out crop damage from birds to his sugar beet in Norfolk.
Dr Avery remained unruffled, reiterating that he had been completely honest and challenging Lord de Ramsey to visit Hope Farm and see for himself. Hope Farm was a small arable unit and probably no less profitable now than it had been when the RSPB acquired it in 2000, he said.
The irony was that the previous speaker, Prof Philip Stott, a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Home Planet programme, had given his audience many more opportunities to question what he said.
Global warming was, he said, was invented in the late 1990s by Margaret Thatcher’s government as a justification for a nuclear energy programme.
No one said a word.
And yet there seemed little unreasonable about Mark Avery’s assertion that the decline in farmland bird populations could be reversed and food production increased without conflict. Yet this proved more than enough to ruffle a few feathers.