Jeremy Clarkson "Farming 20-12-2020 " Sunday Times Magazine

[Pilatus]

Hope you can read it if you enlarge attached file . Seasons Greetings to you all.

 

[Still Farming]

Stirs the sh-t?

 

[Steevo]

Looks interesting!! Bit fuzzy/out of focus so not too easy to read sadly.

 

[Wuffler]

Looks interesting!! Bit fuzzy/out of focus so not too easy to read sadly.

... a bit like this forum!

 

[lloyd]

I wonder if he's ever cast an eye over any of the threads on TFF and which would be his favourite.He brings a bit of humour to farming which is needed but Jezza if your reading this who the heck convinced you to keep sheep?

 

[Goweresque]

Looks interesting!! Bit fuzzy/out of focus so not too easy to read sadly.

If you used the zoom in function on the picture viewing page you can read it quite easily.

 

[Will 1594]

And the last 5 lines just sums up the whole job

 

[s line]

Hope you can read it if you enlarge attached file . Seasons Greetings to you all.

I went to his farm shop back in the summer.

Had to be done!

 

[nick...]

Mr Clarkson talks a lot of sense and when his new program starts people may start to realise what issues we face and support farmers a bit more.i understand farmers are far more valued than we were a year ago after all this COVID rubbish,supplying people with better quality foods from farm shops.
nick...

 

[Dave6170]

Mr Clarkson talks a lot of sense and when his new program starts people may start to realise what issues we face and support farmers a bit more.i understand farmers are far more valued than we were a year ago after all this COVID rubbish,supplying people with better quality foods from farm shops.
nick...

You'd think this year would of been a big wake up call to the government to the importance of UK grown food, but no! Its still trees trees trees!

 

[Hfd Cattle]

You'd think this year would of been a big wake up call to the government to the importance of UK grown food, but no! Its still trees trees trees!

They can see no further than their noses

 

[linga]

They can see no further than their noses

Cant see the wood for the trees

 

[roscoe erf]

he should be president of the n.f.u we'd get something done then

 

[MOG]

he should be president of the n.f.u we'd get something done then

It may the easiest way for him to get a seat in the House of Lords!

 

[Kildare]

He has a good way of getting his point across without offending and funny

 

[MrNoo]

I wonder if he's ever cast an eye over any of the threads on TFF and which would be his favourite

Well, it would have to be the forum favorite on "How to remove a Dead Horse" anything else just pales into insignificances

 

[JP1]

Jeremy Clarkson’s words of wisdom :
Fishing. It’s not one of my specialist subjects. I do not want to stand up to my gentleman’s area in an icy Scottish river and I’d rather spend my spare time in the pub, with friends, than sitting, by myself, on a damp canal bank with a bag full of maggots. Fishing, really, is for people who hate their children.
But, this morning, I feel duty-bound to come to the defence of the nation’s anglists, who are being blamed for an alarming drop in salmon numbers in Scottish rivers. There used to be a time when 25% of all the fish that left their birthplace came back. Today, it’s just 5%.
Those who enjoy animal rights say fishermen and fishermen women are to blame, along with farmers and bankers and possibly Mrs Thatcher, and conveniently fail to mention a couple of important points. Almost all the salmon caught by anglers are allowed to resume their journey after they’ve been landed. And, more importantly, the mouth of every Scottish salmon river is patrolled these days by an armada of hungry seals.
You want to get the salmon numbers up, you must do something about the number of seals. But what? Seals have big doe eyes and puppy-dog faces, and no one wants to see them being beaten to death with bats.
This, then, is the problem with conservation. Protect one species — and seals are very protected — and it’s going to have an impact on another. It’s all a question of balance and being sensible. Which, I’m afraid, is hard when our government is being advised by a Swedish teenager and Chris Packham.
Packham is a wildlife presenter on the BBC, and I like him. He’s a good communicator, fun to be with, hugely knowledgable about punk rock and able to tell a corn bunting from a reed bunting at 400 paces. He’s also a fine lobbyist. So fine, in fact, that, having teamed up with a former conservation director of the airborne wing of the Labour Party, the RSPB, he was able to convince the government’s conservation watchdog, Natural England, to announce that it is now illegal to shoot pigeons.
Now I’m not going to be silly about this. Last weekend, as the sun blazed down, I very much enjoyed sitting in the garden listening to the wood pigeons cooing away. It’s a sound that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And I don’t hold with the argument that town pigeons should be hounded to extinction because they crap on your car. They do, but it’s not a big issue to get a hosepipe and wash it off.
However, I’m a farmer these days, and one of the things I grow is oilseed rape. I grew enough last year to make 100,000 bottles of vegetable oil.
This year, though, things are tricky, because a weed called black grass, which is immune to herbicides, is ravaging the crop.
And what’s left is being half-inched by pigeons. I’m told that I can try scaring them away with loud bangs and kites and statues of Jon Pertwee, but I’m also told by the Viyella army of local countrymen that none of these things actually works. You have to shoot them. And now we can’t.
Score one for Packham and Corbyn’s RAF. But hang on, because if there’s less oilseed rape, that means there’s less vegetable oil, which will drive demand for alternatives such as palm oil. And palm oil production is what’s destroying the jungles of Indonesia, and with them the orang-utan.
So what the do-gooders have done by helping the pigeon, which is as prolific as nitrogen, is kill more of Borneo’s endangered orange monkeys. And that’s obviously idiotic. Happily, there seems to be a solution.
For nearly 40 years farmers have been using a so-called general licence to shoot pigeons, because they’re protected under wild bird legislation, drawn up to save important stuff like the osprey and the golden eagle and so on.
In short, you could get permission to shoot certain kinds of common and unimportant wild birds, such as pigeons and crows and magpies, if it was bleeding obvious they were stealing eggs, pecking out the eyes of lambs or devastating crops. Well, thanks to Chris Packham’s lot, that permission has now gone.
There is one idea for keeping the pigeon under control. Simply remove it, along with the crow and the magpie, from the legislation covering wild birds. Then no special permission to kill it is necessary. It’s not as if this minor shift in the law would cause millions to take to the countryside each weekend in weirdo NRA combat strides, because to shoot a pigeon you need a gun, and you still need a licence for that.
But will the government allow a pigeon free-for-all? It should. It makes sense. We live in weird times, though, when governments in general and ours in particular are entirely detached from the real world. They seem to live in a universe full of unicorns and magic fairy dust. So there’s no way Michael Gove, who’s running the countryside this week, is going to say, “Lock and load, Farmer Giles. Let’s waste the motherf******!”
So what about this for a plan? We pat Chris Packham on the back and say, with a magnanimous smile, that he has won. A bit like remainers are being urged to do by Brexiteers. But then we carry on as before. A bit like Brexiteers are being urged to do by remainers.
Seriously, can you see the police being that bothered? Really? About the death of a pigeon? And how would they ever know? A shotgun is noisy, but it’s not so noisy that it can be heard in the nearest police station, which these days is usually 20 miles away. And only open from nine to five. On a Tuesday.
Plod isn’t interested when I have a gate or a quad bike nicked, so I can hardly see a Swat team coming through the door with an enforcer ram because they suspect the pie I’m taking out of the Aga has four and twenty pigeons in it.

 

[Ffermer Bach]

You'd think this year would of been a big wake up call to the government to the importance of UK grown food, but no! Its still trees trees trees!

Well, as everyone in the cities or the media knows, food, is supplied by the supermarkets! I expect, they may realise that farmers are involved somewhere along the line, but as they all know, farmers are a "basket of deplorables" and "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic" (I know I have quoted/paraphrased Hilary Clinton, but I think her remarks showed the attitudes perfectly, and I know she was talking about Trump supporters not farmers).