Was it just me - maybe it was - but was Peter Kendall in a bit of a bad mood today?
Have a look at the Farmers Guardian debate and judge for yourself.
Peter seemed very keen to have a go at me and the RSPB whatever I said.
And how predictable to see NFU mouthpiece Guy Smith going back to criticising the FBI - there is precious little acceptance, by the NFU President or by Guy Smith, that there is a problem with farmland birds. The NFU's attitude to the environment may be summed up by Peter Kendall's phrase 'wrapping (farmers) in green tape'. Remember please, NFU, that's the taxpayers' money you get and so there do have to be some rules attached to it.
But very good to see lots of good comments - many I guess from farmers who are working closely with the RSPB in all sorts of ways.
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A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
EP - the NFU website says very little if anything about conservation. Eventually you come to a link headed 'Wildlife Issues' - speaks for itself really. Wildlife is merely an issue, not valued, not an opportunity, but a bit of a thorn I suspect. Where is their advice that is given by charities like the RSPB for free and by people like me who spend their weekends voluntarily surveying farms. The NFU isn't interested - thank god the RSPB are!
It’s very difficult to achieve anything positive from such an exercise with each party (RSPB, NFU, CLA & FG) working to a pre-defined script and with the live audience bombarding all with observations or questions – and only 60 minutes to do it in!
Page 3 of the current FG headlines –
“NFU slams RSPB over ‘shameful’ accusation”
So how can the NFU be anything other than somewhat tetchy with the Mark and the RSPB?
The only point I would make is that Mark said “We (the RSPB) love farmers to bits!”
Well it is all too apparent that both Mark & the RSPB palpably do not!
Rather - the following statement:-
“After the sick diseased, distressed, infective, tuberculous badger population (which should be left alone to rot along with other similarly infected wildlife and domestic cattle) we love some farmers to bits!” is more (wholly?) accurate.
Do you see? That just isn’t good enough – I might work with you if it was beneficial to me – but I would not regard you as a friend.
And I spoke with Kendall’s secretary immediately before the transmission and to the FG immediately after! I know what I’m talking about!
True friendship (let alone love) doesn’t work the way the current RSPB regime believes it should!
With friends like the RSPB .....................?
Essex Peasant - so how did yields keep going up until recently ? (I'd be interested to know why home grown food has decreased - is it Oil seed rape going to non-food uses ?)
The stats are all very well - but birds probably illustrate it better - what about Yellowhammer ? When i started birdwtaching you ticked it like Robin or Great Tit. Now you have to look for them - I haven't seen one yet this year. I'd be interested in your views on an unintended consequence - oil seed rape and the extent to which it may have reduced lost grain because when it came in farmers had to make their combines much less leaky ?
One thing that did interest me in what Peter Kendall said was about less intensive farming - last night there was a farmer on TV talking about minimal cultivation as a way of saving diesel. I worked on ultra low volume herbicide application in the 1980s, aimed at reducing hauling water into the hills rather than the environment - but it 'placed' a much lower volume of active ingredient much more acurately due to consistent drop size & an electrostatic charge. I dobelieve in technology - just mistrust the way a lot of its applied (as with GM) - and its interesting to consider just how much we could achieve through applying even what we already know. I'd support public money going into helping farmers upgrade to lower inputs - just as it did so successfully to help dairying clean up its act & our rivers.
We really need to think a bit broader and open a dialogue between the town and countryside - I don't think the almost religious defence of how things are now is helping - I know NFU are trapped by their membership but bthere is a need for much braver leadership on both sides of the argument. And the farmers do themselves no good getting personal - RSPB have been very, very careful not to criticise individual farmers - they haven't got into how much subsidy individuals get, for example, an obvious target and have only named farmers they've praised.
I followed the debate live Mark and thought the approach adopted by the NFU and CLA representatives were predictable including the "red herring" of the RSPB criticising farmers. I did make a comment myself but it didn't seem to get posted. I thought both those parties were quite dismissive of the RSPB and the comment about, you should be in the pub or something like that, was unnecessary. I thought they glossed over the fact that the farmland bird index is not improving at all and that wildlife levels are the best indicators of the health of the natural environment generally. They seemed little interested in the example you made of making skylark patches. As you say, they get a lot of tax payer's money. Also I felt like saying to them, there are over a million people in this country alone (RSPB members) who are concerned about skylark patches, so DO NOT dismiss skylark patches or the RSPB so lightly!
redkite
You're right, it was probably a Sparrowhawk not a Hobby, I was guessing from a long distance, there was defintely a Harrier about though, Hen harrier I think. You boys have more tuned in eyes than me, but I know most my birds.
As said, I don't deny species I used to see more of as a boy like sparrows and yellowhammers have declined and changes in farming are one of the reasons and we do put measures in place to help bring them back. But I do get fed up with this idea that because species I see regularly on the farm are not one of the 19 on the Farmland Bird Index then they are not considered indicators of farmland bio-diversity. Its nonsense.
Nightjar, I won't deny there was intensification in the 1960s and 1970s, but there has been none in the last 25 years, in fact its the opposite, so to try to correlate species loss in the last 25 years with changes in farming doesn't add up.
EP
Paysan savant