The former Defra secretary, Caroline Spelman this week accused the man behind the latest EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, former Agricultural Commissioner, Dacia Ciolos, of disregarding the good environmental work done on the UK’s farms, according to Farmers Guardian. Chairing a Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum conference on the CAP last Thursday, Mrs Spelman stated that the Ciolos’ reform had ‘shackled some of our most progressive farmers’.
Mrs Spelman explained that the CAP reform, coming into effect in January, had failed to live up to the Commissioner’s ambitions to use big global challenges such as food security and climate change. Mrs Spelman was herself closely involved in negotiating the CAP reforms and expressed that the Commission had failed to forge ‘common policy applying to 28 member states with incredible diversity of agriculture’. She went on to say that the current ‘one size fits all’ approach was always going to be difficult to achieve and that is why she views the CAP reforms as such a compromise. She went on to comment that it was difficult for the UK to accept greening measures like crop diversification when they had already been doing it for years and the environmental benefits paled into insignificance compared to the other environmental work UK farmers were already doing.
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The Scottish Government’s deputy director of agriculture and development, David Barnes, stated that the timetables were too tight for 2015 and that it was seeking two equivalence measures in 2016. One would be an additional measure for the permanent pasture measures, supplementing it with a requirement for farmers to keep a record of fertiliser planning, encouraging them to use the right amount of fertiliser at the right time.
A valuable tactic in providing farms have access to the right amounts of fertiliser at the right times comes in the form of storing pre-mixed and bulk bought fertiliser in large volume horizontal and vertical storage tanks. Enduramaxx tanks enable farms to store up to 30,000 litres of mixed fertiliser. Made from rugged rotationally moulded UV-stablised polyethylene, fertiliser is protected against spillage and the elements until it is required.
To learn more about storing fertiliser and the Enduramaxx range of potable water tanks, rainwater tanks and other horizontal and vertical storage tanks, please get in touch.
