Farming

Thursday

George Monbiot

Meet the greatest threat to our countryside: sheep

The section of the A83 that runs between Loch Long and Loch Fyne in western Scotland is known as the Rest and Be Thankful. It would be better described as the Get the Hell out of Here. For this, as far as I can tell, is the British trunk road most afflicted by landslips. The soil on the brae above the road is highly unstable. There have been six major slips since 2007, which have shut the road for a total of 34 days. The cost of these closures is estimated at about £290,000 a year. It’s a minor miracle that no one has yet been killed. The Scottish government

Thursday

James Delingpole

Since I moved to the country, I’m on the side of the squirrel-killers

What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA? The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken any pleasure in poor, sweet, bushy-tailed Mr Nutkin’s death. This was the mistake made by Defra secretary of state Owen ‘Butcher’ Paterson, who was revealed over the weekend to have upset visiting Tory colleagues by showing pictures of himself cheerfully posing with the decapitated victims of his Kania 2000 squirrel traps. ‘I’m not sure what

Saturday

David Blackburn

Sir Andrew Motion, there’s much more to rural life than housing

Five years of living in squalid parts of London has made me appreciate my rural upbringing. I grew up on a small farm on the borders of West Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire. It’s an area of outstanding natural beauty, a stretch of wooded undulations pocketed between the North and South Downs. The house is perched on one of these small hills, facing south east with a view across the flat expanse of East Sussex. On a clear day such as this, you can see the shadow of the Low Weald, the hills which divide Sussex and Kent, through the haze. There’s nowhere I’d rather be. It is a quiet corner

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 21 March 2013

Rift Valley ‘We’re on the frontline,’ I said. ‘And however many guns we had, it wouldn’t be enough against the cattle rustlers.’ ‘Yes,’ replied my friend Jamie, a shareholder in our farm. ‘You’re low-hanging fruit.’ I showed him the bullet holes riddling my Land Cruiser, and told him again about the ambush, the raids, how farm manager Celestina was having a nervous collapse, how the police never came to our rescue. ‘Jamie, we might have to give up the cattle,’ I said. ‘It will break my heart — this is what I had instead of a mistress to get me through middle age.’ ‘Aidan,’ he said, ‘they’re cows.’ On the

Thursday

Alex Massie

The problem with government

David Frum offers a useful caution politicians might heed. Amidst the stupidity and vanity of politics it’s occasionally worth remembering that government is an impossible business. It is much like George Kennan’s description of the hazards faced by even weekend farmers: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbour comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven’t kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the

Saturday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Down on the farm

Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at something else too? As a quarter of Blur, Alex James (above), spent a decade creating critically acclaimed yet commercially successful pop anthems, thereby earning himself access to more drink, drugs and Doris than you could shake a Fender Precision bass at. Fair enough, say the rest of us (through gritted teeth). What isn’t on is the fact that it now seems James, having retired to a farm in the Cotswolds, can also write like a god. This won’t come as a total surprise to readers of The Spectator, where the

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Can A Cheeseburger Exist Outside A Post-Agrarian Society?

A post arguing that this is a Question To Which the Answer is No has been cropping up on my Facebook feed lately and now I see that Andrew Sullivan has linked to it as well. As Waldo Jaquiath puts it, the cheeseburger was until relatively recently an impractical concoction. Not impossible, perhaps, but one requiring many actors and moving parts: This past summer, revisiting the idea [of making a cheeseburger “from scratch”], I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat [for the bun], raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for

Sunday

David Blackburn

Badgering Spelman

The stars must be crossed for Caroline Spelman. First came the forests, then the bin collection fiasco, then the circus animals and now the FT’s Jim Pickard has news that the Cabinet will meet in mid-July to discuss whether to start a badger cull in the south-west. Badgers are one of those perennial issues of contention. As Pickard says: ‘It’s one of those classic issues where both sides have a highly convincing argument. The farmers (who have, I’m told, offered to underwrite the killing) believe that badgers have caused bovine TB among cattle herds and are pushing hard for the cull. But the animal welfare people want vaccination instead. They say

Saturday

Sybil Kapoor

The buck stops here

It’s time we as consumers realise our own power to change things, and reconnect with our farms, says Sybil Kapoor This May, the National Trust launched a radical social experiment. Under the title ‘MyFarm’ (my-farm.org.uk), they invited up to 10,000 web users to actively manage Wimpole Home Farm in Cambridgeshire, entirely over the internet. Once a month Richard Morris, the farm’s manager, will ask for instructions on a particular farming decision. Over the next three years, every farming dilemma will be posed, from whether to sow clover in the hope of rain to how to make rare breed pigs more profitable. Morris will set the parameters of each choice and

Wednesday

Rob Gray

A missed opportunity to strengthen the Big Society in rural areas

David Cameron came into power promising to deliver the greenest government ever and this week the government published its Natural Environment White Paper. In his article on this site, Richard Benyon – Defra Minister and long-time supporter of rural affairs – explains where he believes this White Paper will make a difference. From provisions to increase outside learning for school children, to recognising the hard work that rural businesses are already doing; there is much to be commended.    ‘The Natural Choice’ promises to repair the damage that has been done to the environment in the recent past and encourage greater involvement in helping nature prosper – the ‘Big Society’

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Visual pleasure

According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. Well, his work is certainly a pleasant sensory experience. Neat patterns of colour, possibly recalling the chakras or energy centres that, in Eastern philosophy, govern our senses and feelings, mark the sections of this one-hour dance. The undeniable prowess of the nine handsome black male dancers with their superbly co-ordinated movements, derived from a mix of idioms, adds

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Pretty boy blue

In his memoir Somebody Down Here Likes Me, Too, the boxer Rocky Graziano, on whom Paul Newman based his performance in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), describes the actor in perfect Runyonese: I could see right off there ain’t one thing phony about this guy. Maybe there was. He was too good-looking. In fact, the guy is pretty… He’s got bright blue eyes, but when you look in ’em you see a hard look dancing around inside. Only one other guy I see these same eyes on an’ that was another friend of mine, Frank Sinatra. When their blue eyes spot a wise guy, the eyes say, ‘Don’t fuck

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Country Life

The countryside can be a wild and dangerous place: Farmers have been warned to be on their guard as scrap metal thieves target large gates in southern Scotland. Three farms in the Selkirk area of the Borders were struck at the weekend. Farmers said the thefts were not only costly but also put livestock at risk of being killed if they wandered out onto nearby roads. The Scottish National Farmers Union said that when the economy was under pressure people needed to guard against “petty, opportunistic crime”. Happily, as best I can tell, none of the gates here have been taken. Yet.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Department of Awkward Votes

I hadn’t realised until Sallie James at Cato pointed me in the right direction that neither John McCain, nor Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton voted on the (awful) 2007 Farm Bill. Well, I guess one can see why. Still, it would be nice to hear their answers to the questions: 1.Why didn’t you vote on the Farm Bill? and 2. If you had would cast a vote, would you have voted Yes or No? Plus: How protectionist is your candidate? Find out here!