Agri-Bullshit

Recently mentioned has been the great 'we are custodians of the countryside' pitch mostly heard from the least responsible of farmers, gamekeepers and sundry landowners who need to be bribed with our money to stop them wrecking the land and its wildlife irreversibly.

There's a rich source of material for those looking for land-related bullshit and you can find it in all sorts of places, some fo them unexpected. Even Private Eye has its own antediluvian farming column written by 'Bio-Waste Spreader'. You might think it's a spoof appearing where it does, but you would be wrong: this is meant to be one of the serious parts of the Eye, though in this case what he has to say is something of a joke, just in fact a repetition of the standard agri-bullshit regularly put out by parts of the industry to bamboozle the less well-informed public.

He is complaining that a part of the Northern Pennines Area is to be used for military training meaning sheep farming will no longer be carried on there.

He refers to this 'area of outstanding natural beauty'; this was always a misnomer - area of outstanding bleak remoteness, maybe. That's almost conceded when he refers to the 'stark landscape' though it should have been a signal to question whether artificially exploited starkness can ever be described as beautiful. As we've seen on Blacka it's not just bracken and bramble that come when you stop exploiting the land but trees too and that means eventually more woodland and a variety of wildlife that relishes more natural conditions. And we know what his preferred style of landscape looks like: just look at Blacka's sheep enclosure. It's the old story again. Those who manage can't bear to think that nature can ever manage itself. As if it ever did.