farming

What to do?
The idea of organic farming is sound and we support it both in principle and practise. Guy Watson owns farms in the UK and France and will be best known for his company, Riverford , who sell and deliver organic vegetables to your door. He wrote the following news letter while working in France and put it on the Riverford website and put a copy in each of the deliveries.

“I get asked about Brexit at every break from our field work. The sentiment is generally that we should stay; that the European project is precious but fragile, and that our exit may make it crumble. Everyone here acknowledges that the EU has problems and needs to become more democratic and responsive to concerns of Europeans rather than Eurocrats, but resentment at a potential exit is not far under the surface. With Holland and the Czech Republic threatening to follow, it is not in Europe’s interest to make exit look easy; indeed, EU politicians are likely to get voters’ approval for making our post-exit life hell. I have no appetite for “ever closer union” or an ever larger Europe; if this was a referendum on whether to join the EU, I would be for staying out, but that train has left and I will be voting to stay for three reasons:

1.

CIWFThe farm animal charity Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) bases its work on the premise that all animals are 'sentient beings'. This is not surprising but it does mean that organisations that legally recognise this fact should aim to avoid the maltreatment of farm animals. Amazingly, the European Union recognised animal sentience in the Treaty of Rome 1972. However, when one considers the plight of North Sea fish under the Common Fisheries Policy or the introduction of American style hog farms in Eastern Europe, the short, sad life of factory farmed chickens, force-fed geese and so on, one does wonder whether the bureaucrats ever read this section or whether this was translated correctly into 27 languages.