Environment

Hundreds of acres of moorland and forestry have been engulfed by wildfires due to the recent dry weather and ’irresponsible’ behaviour of people visiting the countryside.

The EU has promised to learn lessons from the coronavirus pandemic by developing a new food security contingency plan.

The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has confirmed that more than 3,800 bridging payments worth around £43 million have been successfully made to farmers and land managers.

A physiotherapy career is not a natural precursor to farming, but Hannah Darby has brought insights from outside agriculture back to the family farm. Chloe Dunne reports.

Around half of Welsh farmers who applied for Glastir payments for 2019 commitments were still waiting for their money at the start of May, prompting concern about how the planned post-Brexit scheme will function.

In promising to uphold the UK’s high food production standards, but refusing to explain how, the Government has displayed a failure of imagination on post-Brexit trade policy, says Tom Lancaster, acting head of land, seas and climate policy at the RSPB.

Faced with the greatest threat to public health this country has faced in our lifetimes, the Government has taken a series of unprecedented steps to protect the NHS and save many thousands of lives, says Defra Secretary George Eustice.

The Government is ‘not getting the message’ that the conservation sector needs financial support to weather the Covid-19 storm, the head of the National Trust has said.

As farmers and landowners have just weeks to request an application pack for the Mid-Tier Countryside Stewardship Scheme, Charity Shaw, of Fisher German, explains how it can provide favourable returns.

With farm visits on hold due to Covid-19, Linking Environment And Farming (LEAF) will showcase the vital work of the industry by running its first online Open Farm Sunday.