Farming

It was the nightingale I liked best. Or maybe the auroch. The nightingale sang strong and marvellously sweet when all the other singers had given up, his voice filling the night. Each nightingale has a personal repertoire of 250 phrases made from 600 individual sound units. I ran into the auroch at six the next morning: enormous, uncompromising and emerging from the bush with a formidable set of horns. Now it’s true that aurochs went extinct 400 years ago; they were the wild cattle of Europe, Asia and North Africa, ancestors of all our domestic stock. But this wild and extraordinary place is full of free-ranging old English longhorn cattle, and their job is to reprise the role of the auroch in creating and maintaining the atavistic landscape of England.

As our Barometer column reminded us this week, a campaign is underway  to reintroduce the Eurasian lynx – which became extinct in the UK around 1,300 years ago – to the British countryside. But is bringing back lynx to the wilds of the UK really a good idea? Well, for starters there are many farmers and livestock owners who certainly won't be very pleased to see them. Lynx UK – who are behind the plans – have claimed that they are willing to subsidise farmers for any loss of livestock that the lynx are responsible for. But that probably won’t put farmers’ minds at rest – especially hill farmers, whose animals would be most at risk from any newly introduced predators.

What’s wrong with eating reindeer? Well, if you normally eat meat, then I’d argue, absolutely nothing. But not everyone agrees with me. The fact that Lidl are selling packs of the meat – with festive golden reindeer on the box – has upset a number of people; presumably because they associate it with a certain Christmas tune about a red-nosed version employed by Father Christmas. But in reality, very little differentiates a loin of reindeer from a standard loin of venison – if anything. After all venison is, strictly speaking, the meat from any deer. So why not just label it 'venison’?

‘Please God, make me good, but not yet.’ I know the feeling. As I get older and more deeply retired, I globe-trot more and my carbon footprint is horrendous. And guilt does not result in abstinence. The brain is persuaded but the flesh is weak. Years ago I chaired Jonathon Porritt’s sustainability organisation, Forum for the Future, and I remember holding a fund-raising dinner for rich Cotswolders and hoping no one would notice my gas-guzzling old car, toasty warm house, and melon with more air-miles than flavour. I’ve tried harder since then, but it’s not easy. A couple of years ago I converted my ancient barn into an eco-friendly house with heat-exchange pump, grey water collection, massive insulation, the lot.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_25_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Melissa Kite, Camilla Swift (and Charlie the dog) discuss animal welfare" startat=630] Listen [/audioplayer]We love animals more than we love people. Of course we do. Following the recent fire at a Manchester dogs’ home, people donated £1 million and blocked the M6 with their cars as they arrived in their multitudes to adopt the displaced animals. It would have been heartwarming, it really would, if we hadn’t also demanded the death of the teenaged boy named on Twitter as the suspect in the arson attack. All over the internet apparently normal people, including ‘friends’ of mine on Facebook, called for a 15-year-old boy to be burned alive. I feel sick about the dogs too.

What some people seem to forget is that Owen Paterson wasn’t (and Liz Truss isn’t) just Environment Secretary. As well as having responsibility for the environment, the role also covers food, fisheries and rural affairs. Paterson was one of the few people in Government that many farmers thought of as being ‘on their side’. As Secretary of State at Defra, he always appeared to have the interests of the rural community and the countryside at the centre of his decisions. As Melissa Kite argues in her cover piece this week, Cameron appears to have given in to ‘the animal rights lot’. As she rightly says, ‘They wanted Owen Paterson’s head on a platter and Cameron has given it to them.

If you were concerned about animal welfare, would you choose to spend money on prosecuting farmers whose welfare is below par? Or would you spend that money on improving animal welfare through regular unannounced farm inspections, and the labeling of meat that has met strict welfare standards? There seems to be a split in the RSPCA, and it’s this farming issue that’s causing all the trouble. At their latest annual meeting the charity’s members voted to support a motion which would see them increase their prosecutions of farmers and slaughterhouse workers, and abandon their current Freedom Food accreditation scheme, according to minutes leaked to The Times.

It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. At least not very much. The notion, apparently scandalous, that the Great British food market is being contaminated - sorry, infiltrated - by meat slaughtered according to traditional religious practices is the most #MiddleClassProblem of the year. I mean, you know it's serious when Waitrose is in the dock. Waitrose! Now I can see that there is a case for requiring meat slaughtered without the animal being stunned to be labelled as such. But, as Melanie McDonagh concedes, the proportion of livestock slaughtered in this fashion is tiny. Perhaps 10% of sheep but only 3% of cattle and 4% of poultry. A reasonable person might conclude that the attention devoted to this newly-discovered problem is as hysterical as it is disproportionate.

How can we encourage children to be closer to nature, when 80% of Britons live in urban areas? This is the question that Michael Gove attempts to answer in his contribution to a recent pamphlet entitled ‘What the Environment means to Conservatives’. He writes, ‘One way we all interact with the natural world is through the food we eat.' As a result, he wants to apply this thinking to education. He has already made cooking compulsory in schools for all children up to the age of 14 from next September. And his ‘School Food Plan’ aims both to improve the standard of school food, and to teach pupils about where ingredients come from, and how seasons affect food supplies.

The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose population is being decimated by poaching. But his advisers should have been quicker to dissuade him from one aspect of his campaign: the threat to dispose of his grandmother’s ivory collection. That Africa’s elephant population is in peril from poachers is not in doubt. Of a total of 400,000 living in the wild, around 50,000 were illegally killed last year, way beyond the numbers which the population could naturally withstand. The future is looking bleak, too, for wild rhino, 1,000 of which were poached in Africa last year out of an estimated total of 25,000.

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade - the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the 'satellite' button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing - or next to nothing - to soak up the rain, water and silt flows straight off the bare fields into the river and heads downstream.

When it emerged that there was horsemeat in cheap burgers, some people thought it might spark a revolution in the British meat industry. Now that the public are more aware of the ins and outs of it all – the complicated and murky supply chains, the potential drug contamination, the images of badly-wrapped frozen meat – perhaps cheap meat would lose its attraction. But it doesn't seem to have done so. Despite the stories about sales of game meat soaring and of people going back to basics and cooking from scratch, sales of processed meats such as sausages and burgers are still booming – both in the UK and abroad. Perhaps a book called Farmageddon will do what previous meat 'scandals' have failed to do.

Would England be the same without the sight of sheep grazing on its 'green and pleasant land'? Most likely not; but, then again, that might not be a bad thing. That is George Monbiot’s view. Spectator readers will already know what Monbiot thinks of the humble sheep. Last summer he wrote about how we ‘pay billions to service a national obsession with sheep, in return for which the woolly maggots kindly trash the countryside’. ‘Britain’, he wrote, ‘is being shagged by sheep’. BBC Countryfile took up the subject of sheep hill farming (Monbiot’s chief bugbear) on Sunday night. This method of farming has its fair share of controversies. For starters, it is heavily subsidised by the government and the EU.