Spare a thought for Anne McIntosh

She must be bemused at the attack on her personally and her performance as an MP.

She has an outstanding record having been an MEP for eight years before becoming our MP in 1997.

Surely, there can be no question about her ability as she has been appointed to chairman the important Defra Committee at Westminster and I believe the first lady to hold this office.

Since my article last week I have asked a lot of people for their views and so far have not come across one who has a bad word to say for her.

If you have a vote left to cast, make your own mind up.

For me Anne McIntosh has always been locally focused but has national ability; and I wouldn’t blame her for chucking in the towel in the face of the bare knuckle hostility.

I hope she does not do that and I hope she does win.

South west flooding chaos

To dredge or not to dredge, that is the question that has been exercising the media minds for the past week.

On the one hand I am desperately sorry for those in the Somerset levels, especially the farmers who now have a lake instead of grass fields; but conversely I am quietly delighted to see the embarrassment of all those pussyfooting environmentalists who have persistently refused to clean our main water ways.

Chris Smith, the chairman of the Environmental Agency, was on Radio 4 this week and he had to admit that dredging would help but was not the complete answer. We all know it is not a panacea but equally it is not rocket science for farmers to understand that the main drain must be kept clear if the laterals are not to back up and allow water to stand on the land.

When challenged, Mr Smith said that the Environmental Agency’s primary duty was to protect life and property but for some reason he didn’t include farmland in either category.

What the Environmental Agency should realise is that agricultural land is as much property as is a row of houses in Pickering, and entitled to the same protection.

The Somerset MP is quite rightly furious and critical that the Environmental Agency managed to spend £30m on creating a wildlife reserve in the Estuary whilst refusing to dredge the rivers on the grounds of economy.

Let us hope the Environmental Agency in Ryedale and those responsible for its drainage have learned the Somerset lesson.

What we want is some old fashioned common sense; Anne McIntosh to her credit has been preaching the same gospel in her parliamentary committee.

Badger population has doubled

Over the past 25 years, badger social groups in England have doubled according to a major survey just completed by Defra and Exeter University.

The number of social groups is estimated at nearly 72,000, which means that there are an awful lot of badgers with potential to spread TB.

The report rather weakly said, “It cannot ascribe the observed changes in estimated badger social group abundance with any degree of certainty; However, it seems likely to be the ongoing result of species protection and changes in habitat quality”.

Commenting on the report, and the implications for TB control, a Defra spokesperson has amazingly admitted that, “We know that badgers spread bovine TB to cattle and that no country has successfully dealt with this disease without addressing infection in the wildlife population”.

We might be getting somewhere at last.

Be thinking SFP 2015

The heading of this piece is a misnomer in that the current SFP will become the new BPS (basic payment scheme) as from January 1, 2015, and some of the rules are now cast pretty well in stone requiring some serious forward planning:

• If you have more than 30 hectares (74ac) of arable land then you have to grow three different crops each year. If you have more than 10 hectares (25ac) then you have to grow 2 different crops.

• The main crop in your rotation must not cover more than 75 per cent of your arable area in the case of two crops and in the case of three crops, the two main crops together can be no more than 95 per cent of the arable area.

• In addition, where you have more than 15 hectares (37ac) of arable, then you have to leave five per cent of the area as an Ecological Focus Area (EFA), which is similar to the old set aside but not requiring the land to be taken out of production.

There are further refinements about grass land, and what constitutes a crop, but it is clear we are going to have to do some pretty careful forward planning for next season.

We are keeping a very close ear to the ground and within the next month will have a programme to try to calculate where each farmer stands.

Students invent cattle app

Young students from Wick High School, in Caithness, have invented a new app for mobile phones which will make life easier for many a cattle farmer.

The children from farming backgrounds had seen livestock farmers going round their stock armed with vast quantities of paperwork to identify individual animals and medicines to be administered.

This app enables the information to be stored on a mobile device and immediately available. Features are numerous but include livestock parenting and vaccination history.

Well done the youngsters – nothing like fresh eyes to solve old problems.