My farming week

It is that time of year again when there is intense tension between the agricultural community desperate to reduce bovine TB and those that seek to protect badgers.

Resilience seems a popular word recently. Looking it up on Google tells me it means ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness’. I quite like that and to me it sums up farming.

You always know that autumn is drawing near as the movement of livestock in and out of our West Wales valley increases.

At the start of this year, I said 2020 could be the year of opportunity for dairy. Little did I know at the NFU Conference in February that we would all be facing a global pandemic and the many challenges which have arisen as a result of Covid-19.

It is just over a week on from the incredible success of #Farm24. Huge congratulations once again to the team at Farmers Guardian for another spectacular event and massive thank you to sponsors Morrisons because without sponsors many dreams would not be realised.

When we were in lockdown, one of the key challenges for our agritourism business and for others was not knowing how long the lockdown would last.

Since I wrote my last article back in April things have changed considerably.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to my MP asking why he chose to vote down the Agriculture Bill when, in the constituency that he represents, the largest sector of employment is agriculture. Do you know what he said?

I write this on the day the twins have gone back to school. It is school, but not as we knew it, with three hours once-a-week for five weeks and they have had some useful teaching of maths, which is a relief from struggling through online worksheets.

While the world is captured by the ravages of Covid 19, the practice of a former political spin doctor to use a ‘crisis to bury bad news’ is as alive as ever.