Urgent help. A friends son is missng This is extremely out of character. Large-scale police search is underway. Any farmers in my network between Ashby and Hartshorne please check your land and any remote outbuildings, he may be injured Please share this tweet by any means posible. thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.…

At long last harvest here is complete - the earliest ever start back in mid July in cereals dead on their feet to today, finally the far from fully ripe organic buckwheat for @Hodmedods which got second wind following the September rain. Cut straight into the drying trailer!

The decline of the hedgehog is mainly caused by the huge recent expansion of the badger population. In both time and place there is a strong negative correlation between badger numbers and hedgehog numbers. The scientific evidence that an increase in Mr Brock may well be the chief cause of Mrs Tiggywinkle’s demise is overwhelming. There’s the direct evidence – the hollowed-out prickle-bearing skins left behind after a badger eats a hedgehog. Only badgers can open a hedgehog after it rolls up in defence with prickles on the outside. Foxes and dogs cannot. Badger predation is often found to be the main cause of hedgehog death in studies in this country. There’s the timing evidence. The decline in hedgehogs coincided with the rise in badgers since the latter’s protection began in the 1970s and was strengthened in the 1990s. Anecdotally, there are clear-cut cases to show this is likely to be cause and effect, not coincidence. Kew Gardens had a thriving hedgehog population until the mid 1980s when badgers first arrived there. Today, says the Royal Botanic Gardens’ website, “Kew is teeming with badgers”. There are now more than 20 badger setts and hedgehogs are hardly ever seen, and if they are don’t last long. Habitat change and development cannot be the cause in Kew, because there has not been any. There’s the spatial evidence. Throughout England hedgehogs (great worm eaters) have vanished from worm-rich pastureland, where badgers thrive, and cling on only in suburban gardens and amenity grassland, where badgers so far have not penetrated much. Even here, as one study put it: “the probability of hedgehog occurrence in suburban habitats declined towards zero in areas of high badger density.” As a general rule, wherever badgers are present at a density higher than about one main sett every four square kilometres, hedgehogs are absent. In most of rural England, sett density is two or three times higher. There’s the behavioural evidence. Back in the 1990s, ecologists discovered that the smell of badgers alone is enough to deter hedgehogs from entering an area. And hedgehogs released into areas of excellent habitat high-tailed it out of there if they smelt badger. They do not wait to be eaten. There’s the international evidence. Sweden has also blamed its decline in hedgehogs on rising badger numbers. In the Netherlands, scientists reported this yearthat hedgehogs are now confined mostly to urban areas, despite roads and development, because of the spread of badgers in rural areas. There’s the experimental evidence, which is the clincher. The randomized badger control trials, carried out between 1998 and 2006 in 30 different parts of the country, provided an opportunity to see what happened to hedgehog numbers if badger numbers were reduced. In pasture land, where hedgehogs are mostly extinct, there was of course little effect. But in “amenity grassland” – parks, lawns, gardens, playing fields etc – there was a dramatic explosion in hedgehog numbers in those areas where badgers were culled: hedgehog density almost trebledfrom an average of 0.9 per hectare to 2.4 per hectare in just five years. By contrast in the control areas where no badgers were culled, the hedgehog density remained unchanged at 0.3 per hectare over the same period.  So we know one way to increase hedgehog numbers: reduce badger numbers. No other approach has been demonstrated to have such an effect. Given that badgers are highly effective predators of bumble bees (those who try to study bumble bees complain that most of the nests they find get dug out and eaten by badgers) as well as of ground nesting birds, and that they carry bovine tuberculosis, there is little doubt that lower badger densities would be good for the ecology of the British countryside as well as for farming. There is nothing natural about the density at which badgers and foxes live in Britain today.

Andy, @andyburnham I am pleading with you to end this nightmare for farming families. Farmers have now lived under the shadow of the farm IHT changes for nearly two years. Behind all the Treasury calculations and political arguments are real families, real farms and an enormous amount of fear. A close friend of my son died by suicide just a week before his wedding. He had been deeply worried about what divorce could mean for the future of the family farm. This year, the brother of one of my closest friends died intestate. His death has left the farm and his family facing terrible uncertainty and complexity at the worst possible moment. These are not wealthy people sitting on disposable assets. A farm is a home, a business, a livelihood and often the work of several generations bound together. For nearly two years families have been trying to work out whether they must sell land, restructure businesses, change wills, divide farms or somehow find money that simply does not exist in cash. The human strain of that uncertainty is immense. Please, Andy, use the Budget to bring it to an end. Restore proper APR and BPR for genuine working farms and family businesses and release farming families from this burden. They need certainty. They need to be able to plan for succession rather than fear it. And, above all, they need to know that passing a viable farm from one generation to the next is not something government intends to punish.

Delighted with the results of our 3rd annual small mammal count to measure the impact of our #agroforestry system. Big overall increase but most significantly a huge increase in the newly created tree line understories. Explains the big kestrel/owl increase too!

Fantastic to finally see The English Organic Action Plan, long overdue and hard earned - congratulations to all those who have worked so hard to make this happen. Organic finally getting the recognition from gov’t it deserves!

Wakelyns and the work and ideas of Martin Wolfe have influenced us enormously here - they literally changed our lives and the way this farm works. We will be proud to contribute to this campaign and hope you might consider it too!

Early drilling means more weeds, but also a possible chance to harrow - with very dry soils and El Niño rumoured we’ve gone early #organic

A wonderful day amongst the oaks, lichens and mosses in the sea facing Abergwynant Woods in our favourite bit of West Wales, with bonus Dipper!

Great start to #OctoberBigDay around the farm - lots of birds and lots of song. Great to have the CB’s singing again too!

No doubt @DefraGovUK will spin it as a great day for farming and nature but reality has been extremely stressful for all. Many though no fault of their own have missed critical funding for habitats already in place. We submitted but had to leave plenty out due to random errors!😡

Has anyone had any reassurance from @Ruralpay that the SFI’26 ‘mechanism’ for those with CS/SFI23 agreements expiring at the end of the year will work - pre existing commitments have scuppered us at every step since the start. Extreme pessimism here!

Four shots from a sequence showing a Short eared owl unsuccessfully trying to rob a Barn owl of its prey yesterday (11/9/26)

Reminder: Canada is a sovereign country! 🇨🇦 We are not and will never be American in any form. 🍁 Retweet if you stand by Canada forever. 🦫

Wonderful visit to Leigh Court Barn today, the largest cruck structure in Britain, built in 1325 - a very special place! @EnglishHeritage

Bird feed sunflowers continue to deliver!

Earliest year ever for everything, except the buckwheat! @Hodmedods

60mm of rain in the week has transformed our heavier herbal ley seedbeds from D- to A+

It rained.... And as predicted on @LBC with @HenryRiley1 not 48 hours ago. Anything in brown is sewage being dumping into the environment right now, in real time, anything in red is sewage dumped over the last 24 hours.

45mm of rain this week and the dream of October forage is very much on! 🤞🏼