There is a piece of legislation, just a far reaching as the proposed Climate Change Bill, which is already on the European statute books and is beginning to make its presence felt here on the farm. Namely the Water Framework Directive. It was passed in 2003 and states that by 2010 each member state will protect and/or restore the quality of all ground and surface water. Yawn, yawn, I hear you say – but actually this is quite a tall order and nearly 80% of UK water resources don’t yet come up to scratch.

Having just hosted a couple of farmer training workshops about this issue - under the snappy banner of Catchment Sensitive Farming - I feel emboldened to bore you further. Now there are basically two types of water pollution, point pollution (where somebody tips a barrel of chemicals into a stream) or diffuse pollution (the kind of background pollution which has many small or tiny contributors).

Agriculture gets most of the blame for the diffuse problem and so we are being asked to voluntarily clean up our act or be faced with some pretty severe regulations. Solutions can be a simple as fixing guttering, moving a gateway or changing the timing of our manure spreading.

Having sorted all of our water issues long ago with the Westcountry Rivers Trust (for whom we are now a demonstration farm), I thought – arrogantly - that I would have nothing to learn from the workshops and simply needed to serve Cathy’s delicious homemade lunch and pick up the cheque.

Well, while it is true that as a responsible organic farmer I do not spread bags of Nitrogen and Phosphates directly onto the fields, it transpires that 12% of phosphorus that ends up in drinking water comes from detergents, i.e. soap, shampoo & washing powder, and here we are in the summer with over 100 campers a day, using our solar showers and flushing criminal amounts of phosphates into the soil via our soak-away.

As we learnt on the day, the cheapest and most effective way of dealing with any pollution is to stop it at the source. And so from this summer onwards we will be providing free eco-friendly (phosphate-free) shower gel and trying to persuade the campers to use it instead of their nasty wash-and-go. In a long line of environmental measures that will cost me rather than save me money (see entry below), I can only hope that it will at least be tax deductible.

I’m not a big fan of Tony Blair (well, I don’t suppose many would admit to it anyway), but every now and then over the last decade New Labour have pleasantly surprised me with a piece of legislation which is bang on the nail. For example, like the handing over of the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England – as anyone old enough to remember the debacle of Black Wednesday will agree.

And so we now have the Climate Change Bill, with a legally binding target of a 60% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050. As I was born in 1962, this should comfortably see me out and will be the guiding framework by which my children live their working lives. OK, so the Tories and Lib Dems are complaining that the carbon budgets should be set annually instead of every 5 years, but due to another of New Labours good moves – the Freedom of Information Act – this is hardly of concern as the world and his wife will be monitoring the situation on a daily basis and holding the government to account.

I’m always keen to “do my bit”, and so when Cathy and I decided that the campsite freezer really needed replacing (the lid would only stay shut with the aid of a large brick – hardly the most eco-friendly of machines), I set out to do some serious research.

Walking in to any electrical salesroom and you would think it would be a doddle. Each appliance now has a large EU Energy Label stuck on the side which gives you a rating from A down to G. No problemo – just plump for the most affordable A rated machine. Ah ha – not so fast. It transpires that for freezers (and for freezers only) there is a little known A+ rating.

If that doesn’t make a mockery of the banding system (putting it on a par with the nonsense of A* grades for school exams) there is worse to come. A visit to the excellent Comet web site shows that there are a small secret band of A++ freezers known only to the very few.

Trawling the web, I come across some university research into this bizarre phenomenon which concludes that replacing your freezer with anything less than an A+ is a waste of time and energy – you had just as well go back to sticking the brick onto the old freezer for the amount of good you will do for the planet or you electricity bill.

So here are some of the figures for comparison

A - BEKO ZA90W (£129.99) - £16.11 to run per year

A+ - LIEBHERR GP1356 (£339.99) - £14.93 to run per year

A++  - LIEBHERR GP1456 (£389.99) - £10.66 to run per year

Having only just done these sums for the purposes of this blog, I shall now keep my fingers crossed that Cathy continues to ignore my scribblings as - you’ve guessed it – I bought the Liebherr 1456 (in fact I bought two!). And at this rate it will only take 47 years to see a financial return on my investment.

This all goes to show what a long way we have to go before we can begin to reduced our emissions by such ambitious targets. My only hope now is that electricity prices go through the roof and make my new freezers look like a good buy!

An invitation dropped into my inbox the other day, “…to attend a party to celebrate the birthday centenary of pioneering ecologist Rachel Carson.” This was from the Soil Association, and while I shall not be attending their shindig up in Oxford, it came very appropriately just as I had finished reading her seminal work – Silent Spring.

It was published in 1962, and details Americas disastrous love affair with the new chemical pesticides developed in the 1950’s. Even today it makes harrowing reading, as she quietly details case-study after case-study of large scale programs of pesticide (ab)use. Examples like the zealous attempts to eradicated such “pest” as the Chaoborous astictopus (a small gnat), which was annoying the fishermen of Clear Lake in California. The solutions was to simply pour the chemical directly into the water in order to effect a dilution that would make the whole lake toxic to the offending insect. Or even more incredibly the case of the Gypsy Moth, where, in an attempt to stop its spread into the city of New York (unlikely given the lack of suitable moth habitat!), nearly a million acres including whole towns and suburbs, were indiscriminately sprayed from the air.

With 50 odd years of hindsight, it comes as no surprise that not only did these schemes fail to eradicated the target insects  - but they wreaked havoc with the local wildlife and completely upset natures natural balance. Rachel’s work exposed the dangerous truths and shook a generation on both sides of the Atlantic.

As an Organic farmer this is one of those books that everyone talks about - but one suspects few have actually read. It has a brilliant title, in which just two words evoke the desolation caused by overuse of chemicals, and almost negates the need to read the book at all. But you should. These “elixirs of death” (as Rachel puts it), are entirely man-made and to this day little is understood of their affect on human health. Every one of us carries a level of these compounds in our bodies – it is impossible to evade. Even unborn babies are affected by their mothers toxicity. 

Strangely, given her in depth knowledge of the subject and the fact that she is now championed by the organic movement, Rachel didn’t suggest chemical abstinence as the solution, but rather more responsible use. So while many lessons were learned, pesticides are still in wide use today – if fact are a mainstay of non-organic agricultural production.

So it is depressing to learn that, since the decline of stubble burning, use of molluscicides (slug pellets) in agriculture in the UK has increased 70 fold in the last couple of decades and has contributed to a sharp decline in the population of the Song Thrush – one of our native farmland songbirds. Perhaps every packet should come with a government health warning – or better still a free copy of Rachel’s book.

Great excitement this week as we took delivery of a brand new pick-up. We had planned to drive to the dealers on Thursday after school so we could all go and take it for a spin into Launceston for a celebration fish & chips. However due to a cock-up at the garage it didn’t have a tax disc and so arrived here on the farm on Friday - as our American cousins would say, “A day late and a dollar short”. Why…well having delivered the truck to the farm a day late the salesman then managed to leave with the keys in his pocket – leaving us with large & shiny (but useless) object in the middle of the yard!

This has a powerful diesel engine and so marks a change in policy for us. All of the other vehicles on the farm (with the exception of the tractor) run on LPG. Our commitment to this more environment friendly and cheaper fuel meant that the last two 4X4s that we had purchased had been powered by very large petrol engines. The technology to convert diesels to LPG has not been successfully developed yet and so large gas guzzling V6s and V8s were our only option.

Having several years ago bought a lemon of a Shogun off of our local garage forecourt, I decided last time to buy a V8 landrover direct from the army surplus. Both of these vehicles, once converted, cost me over 5 grand and both kept my local mechanic in gainful employment for nearly a decade - and in the end, I suspect, enabled him to take a once in a lifetime trip to Australia. Both were terrible false economies - and when at the last MOT my freshly tanned mechanic announced that the landrover chassis was rotting away and would not pass another, I determined to get a new vehicle next time.

The landrover only actually achieved around 10 mpg, and while very nippy actually proved to be a poor towing vehicle indeed – struggling to pull our livestock trailer up the local hills. So I reasoned a diesel with claims of around 30 mpg would be a better prospect for both the farm and the environment. Anyway – I thought – now I can look into these much talked about Bio fuels with their oft quoted benefits to farming and mankind.

However, a little research soon reveals that commercial Bio Fuel, “which offers dramatic environmental benefits” is actually a mixture of 95% fossil fuel and only 5% plant based fuel. Worse still comes when you discover that 85% of the emissions saved within your 5% are actually lost during the agricultural production of the oil seed rape. So the net savings of greenhouse gases is actually 0.75% – hardly what you would call dramatic.

No – without doubt – the best course for the fight against global warming, the best way of minimising the fuel bills, the best way of keeping up the resale value and keeping down the maintenance cost, is to leave the truck in it’s new home, under the barn, and only use it when absolutely necessary. Yeah right…. “Dearest, we’re nearly out of milk – me and the kids will just slip down the village and get some”