Category: News and events

Organic agriculture and other forms of ecological agriculture have received a boost in a new report from the House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil.

Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the further destruction of forests and other valuable habitat.

Defra not to cull badgers – will use vaccination for TB when available

BBOP details

Initial results from test baking of the composite cross populations show that the populations perform consistently between organic and conventional systems, unlike a mixture and a conventionally-bred variety which do well in non-organic but not organic systems

Defra study illustrates problems of locking up soil organic carbon

Cabinet Office report says proper food policy could save 70,000 lives a year

Dysfunctional technology of GM is no answer to world hunger

Is the UK organic sector defying food industry and media sceptics who’ve predicted that the organics and fair trade sectors will be the first to be hit by the credit crunch? And whose figures on the size of the UK organic retail market should we believe anyway?

UK risk of BSE downgraded

Land area under organic management in Wales increased by 15% in 2007 and now amounts to some 90,000 ha on 800 holdings, that’s 6.3% of Welsh agricultural area.

The sorry saga of UK incompetence in the administration of farm subsidy continues. The Farmers Guardian reports that a large number of payments made to farmers under Organic Entry Level Stewardship (OELS) are being reviewed after Natural England found that some had been overpaid by up to £25,000.

A new Defra –funded, Bristol University study says one in four battery-reared chickens has difficulty walking.

Finally supermarkets are properly investigated

This week The Times reported the findings of work in the United States on avian influenza which shows that in addition to the H5N1 strain, a few H7 strains of the virus have also started to evolve some of the traits they would need to infect people easily.

Paul van Aarle of Intervet says that after Bluetongue, we can expect to see Rift Valley Fever and West Nile-virus arriving in Europe before long.

Health check of CAP

The development of a complex legume based mixture for better fertility building is to become a reality in a new project, led by the Organic Research Centre, Elm Farm. The mixture will be designed to optimise the transfer of nitrogen from the fertility building ley to the subsequent crops in the rotation.

We are living in a changing world. Organic farmers, along with all farmers across the globe, are operating within a new order of global warming and apparent food shortage.

It’s official – scientists are now able to say with some certainty that the global climate change, observed over the past four decades, is not the result of natural phenomena. It is man made.

New report forecasts rising profits for UK organic arable

The charity Send a Cow has urged world leaders meeting in Rome to invest in small-scale organic farming as the best way out of the world’s food crisis for the poorest of the poor.

This week sees the first meeting of a new National Standing Committee designed to encourage the sustainable use and protection of the UK’s rich diversity of livestock breeds.