We hear quite a lot in the press and other media lately about farming, food production, pollution and the environment.

Some of it very useful and constructive and some not so.

As farmers and land owners are moved away from the old Direct Payments system to the new much fairer and much more environmentally supportive system of payments of public money for the public good hopefully things will improve.

For too long farmers and landowners have received large amounts of public money based solely on the number of acres they owned and with no account of what they did with the land or how they cared for it or not.

So much of our valuable countryside and natural areas are damaged and degraded, not all by farming, but farming does have much to answer for.

A lot of modern agriculture is driven by society’s obsessive desire for cheap food regardless of the environmental cost. Chickens for £3 is ridiculous. People of my age will well remember our mothers having to spend around 30 per cent of the household budget on food; now it is about 13 per cent.

We the consumers are much to blame for the damage intensive agriculture does and has done to the natural world and our environment because we love to buy all this cheap, poorly produced food.

The Red Tractor mark is promoted as showing good welfare standards and yet it allows chickens and pigs to be housed so intensively that they have absolutely no quality of life whatsoever and live miserable lives away from fresh air, sunlight and the right to roam, which the RSPCA and ORGANIC standards give.

Very often we hear it said that farmers are custodians of the land and countryside. Well some definitely are, but a big majority simply use the land as tool to produce cheap food at as higher profit as possible with no real regard for their responsibility to care for and nurture the that land and environment.

Don’t we all have a responsibility to leave something we own in a better state than when we acquired it?

Hopefully the new system of payments will encourage and support farmers and landowners to do more to value and support the land and environment they are responsible for?

Maybe this new payment system will push up the cost of food production and allow farmers to produce better quality food and get paid a fair price for it while their housed animals get a better quality life and us as consumers learn to value not the cheapness of food but the quality of it and the nourishment we get from it.

I could go on and on because there is so much of our natural world that needs help to repair and heal and so many species in desperate decline.

What are we leaving for our children and particularly our grandchildren? We should be ashamed of what we have allowed to happen.

Clive Jude

Berriew