I can't help with a Welsh perspective, I was also taken aback at the level of crap being dished out.
It's the completely unjoined up thinking. Subsidise new dairies to create Jobs and growth in the country and the write off the production of milk with multiple levels of environmental intervention.
New labour leader new politics?
Highly unlikely. It’s such a shoe in they’ve just created a sounding board of yes men and women. I’d honestly liken it to putin in Russia. The dairy farms locally are dropping like flies.New labour leader new politics?
No chance.New labour leader new politics?
vantage jnr, graduated last year from Hartpury with a first class honours degree in Agriculture, also had the highest marks for his year, he’s just won a scholarship to NZ, sadly I hope he sees the light and sees Wales dairy farming as a lost cause. My father was two years in NZ and wanted to emigrate when he married my mother back in the UK, but she wasn’t keen, although I had an auntie and have cousins there, so perhaps it’ll be a third generation thing!
Haverfordwest now has 3 dairies. First Milk cheese, Mark Hunter who bought the milk and more business in South Wales from Muller, who does liquid and butter and now a new liquid dairy funded by WAG. You couldn’t make it up!
That's the positive bit. Then there's the politics
. For us probably the lack of any common sense with tb vectors being the most detrimental.
But how long will that be enough for them? How long until it migrates to 10% of new trees and habitat.
Keep hearing this but the milk is still there nationally so some must be expanding?
I don't know. I think their ultimate goal is 30% managed as habitat.
Even if that could be justified, which I doubt, it should be of all land, not 30% of each individual farm. Their aim should be to maximise the efficient use of suitable land while incentivising some farms and farmers to retire completely. Otherwise every farm food producing business will be crippled and no longer viable as a business. Imagine if they told every supermarket, petrol station, pub, cafe, accountant, doctor, that they must cut down their business by 30% long term and 20% over a fairly short term. How many of those businesses would remain viable and how many would go bust or otherwise fail financially? Imagine the stink and unrest it would cause, especially if they imposed stinging extra legislation to beat them down with simultaneously, such as they had to increase their storage by double and could not operate the till for four months of the year and were banned from advertising or buying more stock [think N fertiliser and slurry equivalents].
All that land probably already qualifies on every metric, so why not count all that land against the 20% they require EVERY farm to effectively take out of serious food production? Why not allow farmers the freedom to farm, like they do in America?