At 1pm today the RSPB is having a live debate with the very clever Prof Allan Buckwell from the CLA and the NFU's President Peter Kendall on whether UK farming is an environmental hero or villain. For details - click here.
You can watch the debate online and even join in. No doubt I'll be blogging about it tomorrow if not before. That is - if I survive.
I wonder whether the NFU President will accept that farmland bird numbers are much lower than they were in the 1970s and 1980s? I wonder whether he will accept that this is mainly due to the way that we farm the countryside? I wonder whether he will agree that it matters? I wonder whether he will praise the work that the RSPB has done at Hope Farm where productivity has increased and wildlife too?
Perhaps the NFU will welcome our Stepping up for Nature campaign.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Glossy ibis - not a pub in sight really. Skylark patches are not a bad example of how farmers get paid for doing good things (and actually probably make more than growing wheat on those plots - so it is real profit) which aren't very difficult to do. If that type of thing doesn't happen easily then what will? It was quite difficult to follow the debate as a panellist too - comments coming from all directions and unclear as to who should post next - but we tried our best. The general thrust of CAP reform should be to use taxpayers' money to pay for public goods that the market doesn't provide. And there are lots of those goods potentially provided by farming and that's why farming is special as an industry.