Brexit and brown flags

So far, very few of the millions of words written about last week’s Brexit have touched on the environment.

It is a sobering thought that many of the reasons why Cornwall’s green and pleasant land is green and pleasant stem directly from the European Union, and unless we now think of a new regulatory framework to protect the public good, our environment will be sacrificed on the altar of private greed and its lust for profit.

Don’t get me wrong – the EU has, historically, done plenty to mess up the countryside. For example, guaranteed Common Agricultural Policy prices for crops such as oil seed rape encouraged over-supply and turn the fields from green to bright yellow.

And as Europe’s butter mountains continue to melt, farmers quite rightly complain that they are now being turned into park-keepers. But at least they are heavily subsidised park-keepers. With huge uncertainty now surrounding their subsidies, why would Cornwall’s farmers not decide instead to become property developers?

It was partly to off-set some of the worst excesses of its own policies that the EU pursued the development of directives to protect the environment, such as the Nature Directives. These provide a framework of EU law which limit what landowners can do on sites which are home to some of our most threatened species and habitats.

Directives to protect habitats and birds formed the foundation of nature conservation across Europe. While some landowners howled about red tape and bureaucracy, many people saw wider, public social and economic benefit in ensuring the triumph of survival over extinction.

Protected sites in the UK were being lost at a rate of 15% a year before the directives, but this declined to just 1% a year after their introduction.

Defra minister and Camborne and Redruth MP George Eustice, a keen Brexiter, has described these protective measures as “spirit crushing.” I heard the Country Landowners Association on the radio on Monday rubbing their hands in eager anticipation at how they might now cash in.

Why was it that in the 1970s we had the highest acid rain-causing sulphur dioxide emissions in the EU and our seas weren’t much more than open sewers as we pumped sewage into them? It was because it was cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to ignore the consequences. It was the EU that drove improvements.

We didn’t hear much from groups like Friends of the Earth during the referendum campaign, but that’s because we in the media thought it much more fun to photograph Boris Johnson waving pasties from his bus. FoE was actually doing its best to warn that shared problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and air pollution were better tackled on a continent-wide basis.

Fishing stocks, and polluted air and seas, are not by themselves respecters of off-shore limits measured in miles. FoE, and several other green groups, were trying to get us to recognise that it was the EU that cleaned up our drinking water, our beaches, and meant that the UK could no-longer be called “the dirty man of Europe.”

Remember the fuss when it looked like Cornwall’s beaches might not be able to fly blue flags? Maybe we should now invest in the manufacturers of brown flags instead.

Always going the extra mile

The patch of oil on my garage floor is now so large I’m thinking of joining OPEC. Unfortunately the oil comes not from a deep well of latent riches, but from the blown turbo on my 15-year-old 310,000-mile Skoda.

Like many people in rural areas, I have little choice but to make my car last a long time. North Cornwall villages are lovely, but can be a gilded cage for those without independent transport.

My Skoda was for several years in harness to a one-man voluntary organisation known as DTS (Dad’s Taxi Service) and has taken its share of knocks (none of them my fault, naturally.) This particular car escaped being pressed into service when the children were learning to navigate the craters at Davidstow airfield, but one of the reasons it might now be approaching its final parking space is the state of Cornwall’s rural roads.

Many of the country lanes in and out of St Mabyn are like a smaller version of Davidstow’s runways – full of holes. The effect on any car’s suspension inevitably takes its toll. It appears that potholes account for a third of mechanical issues on UK roads and cost British motorists an estimated £2.8 billion every year.

The Federation of Small Businesses recently produced a report which said that potholes were one of the top three issues of concern to rural firms.

Cornwall has more than 4,500 miles of roads, many of them in country areas. The A30 (east of Chy-An-Mor roundabout, Penzance) and the A38 are trunk roads are the responsibility of the Highways Agency. All of the rest are down to Cornwall Council.

The council says it evaluates highway maintenance requirements and allocates the highway maintenance budget at the beginning of each financial year. I can only assume that St Mabyn didn’t make the list this year.

The FSB said poorly maintained roads, and a lack of regional strategic planning, posed “a significant economic barrier to economic growth,” particularly in rural areas.

The report, “Going the extra mile,” showed rural businesses were more likely to rely on roads as they often reported little or no access to public transport.

The FSB is calling for new combined authorities to commit to greater investment in local transport. Surprisingly, many of those who responded to the FSB did not know who was responsible for keeping roads in good repair.

The report certainly struck a chord with me, and I suspect with many other people. Indeed, the BBC once ran a competition inviting people to submit photos of their “favourite” pothole. The Beeb was inundated with replies.

Motoring organisations claim that at current maintenance levels, the average frequency for a road to be resurfaced in England is once every 54 years. If all councils were given the budgets they need to fix their roads (and they won’t be,) it would still them 12 years to catch up with the current backlog.

Few things wind people up as much as potholes. Only last week a Cotswold woman made national news headlines because she posted signs saying “No Roads Here, Only Holes.”

In recent years Cornwall Council has seen its annual compensation bill steadily rising – about £120,000 last year.

I know that it’s all about tax-and-spend, and priorities. Maybe there’s a case for devolving responsibility for country roads to town and parish councils. Would that make things better or worse?

Nigel Farage and Chris Evans resign on the same day

We need bigger newspapers.

Economics of the real world

Another year, another show over. By the time you read this, planning for 2017 will be well underway.

For me, the stand-out story of last week’s Royal Cornwall Show was the Little Bo-Beep girl and her prize-winning sheep. As I am now even older than the average age of a British farmer, it made me ponder the future of the agriculture sector and what it means for rural Cornwall.  

One of the stands at the show was offering airfares and eight months’ accommodation for people willing to go and work on farms in New Zealand. I wonder how many of Cornwall’s Young Farmers will have been tempted by that.

Every year a bunch of City boys called Deloitte and Touche produce a report on the state of British agriculture – where the value comes from, who generates that value, and where the money goes.

Last year’s D&T report for producers in the dairy sector was truly dire – falling commodity prices, accelerating consolidation (farm mergers) and fewer farmers. The main drivers for this collapse in milk prices were a dramatic slowdown in demand from China and the impact of Russia banning imports of dairy products.

In 1939, Britain had almost half a million farms, the majority less than 40 hectares, and employed almost 15% of the population. Since then Britain has lost over a third of its farms and the agricultural workforce has been in serious long-term decline.

As farms get bigger, they get fewer in number; the number of people working on the land has been tumbling for decades. Another thought-provoking stand at last week’s show was the robotic milking system which offers to milk your herd for only £30 a day. I know that wages for contract milkers are low, but I don’t think anyone could afford to do it for less than £30 a day.

Many of the structural issues affecting dairy farmers are now spreading to the cereal and meat sectors. Food prices have fallen to their lowest level for five years. British beef prices fell by 15% last year, while the country remains a net importer of the meat.

Talk about the butterfly effect: some bureaucrat in China or Russia types at a computer keyboard, and my neighbour goes out of business. I find it hard to get my head round how far the agriculture sector has come from the days when milk from the farm seldom travelled beyond the nearest town.

I am not a farmer, I have only three acres of land and I essentially just mess about, scratching a long-held itch to learn more about agriculture and what it is that makes rural Cornwall what it is.

One thing seems clear. The divorce between consumer and producer has grown so wide that a natural product like milk is now simply a “commodity” which is traded on rollercoaster stock exchanges around the world.

Politicians have set up, and then abolished, milk marketing boards; they have set up, and then abolished, milk quotas; we have now arrived at a situation where supermarkets dictate what is to be produced and how much they want to pay for it.

This separation between town and country has profound implications for all of us.

This Facebook video shows George Galloway doing what he does so well - it's worth watching

George Galloway on the plot against Corbyn

The last 10 seconds

As scholarly readers of the Cornish Guardian, and William Shakespeare, will know, Hamlet was not talking about chickens when he said “I must be cruel only to be kind.”

I must however confess to a degree of Hamlet-style melancholia whenever I have to cull any of my poultry.

It is a sad fact of any agricultural venture that livestock, from time to time, develop illnesses or injuries which cannot reasonably be put right. And in those circumstances, it is in my humble opinion a kindness to end the suffering.

Last month I had to observe one of my chickens which had developed a pronounced limp. There was no obvious reason, but this bird stopped using her perch and instead roosted in one of the nest boxes. She struggled to get out of the coup in the morning and hobbled painfully, and slowly, towards her food and drink.

There was no sign of any infection, but I nevertheless put her into a separate run and waited to see what happened. Luckily, after three weeks, she showed signs of improvement and is now restored to the company of her very healthy sisters.

Not every instance has such a happy ending. Although I do not cull birds simply because they get old and stop laying eggs, very rarely one of the chickens develops a virus-like illness which prompts a rapid decline. And in those circumstances, I wring the unfortunate animal’s neck.

Readers of a nervous disposition might want to stop here. Others might be interested to know that the final moments of these birds are protected by the 2015 WATOK regulations.

These are the Welfare of Animals at the Time Of Killing rules and govern such exotic details as the correct procedure to adopt when slaughter is carried out in accordance with specific religious requirements – which sometimes means an animal cannot be stunned before death.

The British Veterinary Association, the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming and the National Secular Society all want to see an end to the religious slaughter of animals or to slaughter without pre-stunning.

But you can imagine the controversy this causes amongst British Muslims and Jews – some of whom warn that any such ban would drive those who observe religious dietary laws out of the UK. For many of the UK’s almost three million Muslims, halal slaughter is a strict religious requirement, as is eating kosher for many of the UK’s 300,000 Jews.

There are some animal welfare groups whose position on culling and slaughter leads them to promote vegetarianism.

I’m pleased to report that such controversies seldom cause any loss of sleep in St Mabyn. A primary consideration is how much time elapses between capture and death – the period during which an animal might be caused additional distress.

I know that some groups advocate the use of an electronic stun tool – which renders the bird unconscious after less than one second. A common method of despatch is to then cut the chicken’s throat, although it can then take up to 30 seconds for the bird to die. Should it fail to die in that time, there is a risk it might regain consciousness.

I think if any of my poultry was still flapping after more than 10 seconds I would need to re-examine my technique.

It’s a grim business, bringing a degree of distress to all concerned. It’s one of those areas which tends to puncture the myth of the rural idyll. But I have to say to anyone contemplating keeping a few chickens – the very first thing you need to know is that at some point, you will have to manage the last 10 seconds.

With the FA Cup, Old Trafford