Bovine TB is a huge worry to farmers
More depressing news for farmers as if they have not got enough. Every cattle farmer in the country must be furious and extremely worried by your front page article ‘Playing politics' (FG, October 20), telling of the mad and dangerous Labour Party's intention to ban badger culling.
Every available tool is needed to keep bovine TB as low as possible until a cattle vaccine is available. Culling has proved a very effective part in reducing numbers and the proof is in the figures quoted in the article. For the first time in 15 years, fewer than 20,000 cattle were slaughtered last year and herd outbreaks were at the lowest since 2008.
Listen to the podcast 'Farmers see no end to Bovine TB' now:
This is an utterly devastating policy by Labour which ignores facts and the increased financial costs that will follow and will only appeal to a tiny minority of the urban population. Tenant farmers are being squeezed out by Defra's divisive environmental schemes which favour landlords and estates in ‘Environment schemes want tenant farmers gone' (FG, October 20).
Under these new schemes, landlords and estates can take out land from being productive agricultural land worked by tenants and back into ownership, thereby collecting the monies offered in the environmental schemes themselves. Why is it that Defra always designs such rotten schemes? Is it out of ignorance or deliberate? Reading John Thorley's Farming Matters article on the back of the same edition - ‘Environment is important, but so is feeding the nation', one begins to conclude that the green blobs' influence and rewilding are determined to rid the country of agricultural food production.
But they forget that without farmers managing our land, we would lose most of our beautiful landscapes too, particularly in the uplands and our National Parks, when it would soon become covered in scrub.
Suzanne Greenhill, Bishops Cleeve, Gloucestershire
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