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.
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.
