It’s always great to get in a new magazine from the printer and today was no exception. The only problem is by the time you know the things you would have liked to put in it if you’d known them at the time it’s too late and they’ll have to wait for the next magazine when you’ll have exactly the same thoughts. The great thing about a blog, though, is that you can jump ahead and air them anyway!

So what would I have included if I’d had the foresight? Well the first thing is probably the selling off of the woodland, which I’d hoped was our heritage. I underuse it myself as it’s mostly the bit next to my house that I take advantage of when walking the dog each morning, but I’d like to take advantage of many more areas of woodland at different times in the future. I know we’ve got to pay of an immense chunk of public debt over the next few years and, although I’m by no means a deficit-denier (I actually dislike this term a lot as it attempts to link the belief with the infinitely more serious act of holocaust denier) I do feel that everything comes down to priorities when making sacrifices.

My real fear links the proposal to sell woodland with the far less emotive (because they’re often misunderstood) propoals on bio-diverstiy off-setting. Effectively if you wish to do some environmental damage in one space you have to have a second space where you can show how you’ve done some good to off-set your other more heinous activity. We have the same ‘get out of jail’ card with pollution where somebody with the ready cash can go to someone with less cash and buy their right to pollute, at least to some extent. It’s slightly different with bio-diversity but again it comes down to spilling something somewhere but rather than wiping up your spillage where it happened you wipe up another spillage of your choice somewhere else. I’m damned if I can get into the spirit of it.

Another issue seemingly taking the country by storm is the contentious issue of micro pigs. For anyone who doesn’t know what they are they are best described as a cross between Barbie and a piglet with a dash of living on a wing and a prayer, the latter because you never know if yours is the one that’s going to be a half ton boar in six months time. The real issue though is not the possible inconvenience for the owner but rather the thought that a pig can be raised like a dog or a cat. The Department of the Environment, Forestry and Rural Affairs state that pigs are classed as livestock and require not just registration but strict dietary consideration and when you hear of someone keeping a pig in a flat and feeding it sausages you realise that something is wrong. Piglets are cute, as are pups and kittens, but the similarity ends there. Dogs and cats do not potentially carry disease which could wipe out the nation’s farm livestock and, with very rare exceptions, their probable eventual size is known. In spite of that we have many rejected dogs and cats to be re-housed and now it seems that the same problem is arising with non-micro micro pigs.

I’m going to end for now with a simple request, though, and it’s one which Ruth, my partner, occasionally grumbles about. She makes jams, marmalade and chutneys and collects any jars she can lay her hands on, and most are OK. There are, however, a small number with labels you just cannot remove, which makes tham a second-rate candidate for re-using. Surely it is better to re-use these jars than to have them broken up and recycled after depositing them in a bottle bank. The recycling process has got to be a greater waste of energy than washing them and filling them again. So all we need to do is ask that all labels are easily removed and, if successful, then in our own little way we’ll have made a difference. There must be hundreds or even thousands of similar but really easy ways to achieve these small changes to the way we do things, but added up they could make a major difference. If I termed them as ‘off-setting’ then perhaps I could even drive a few more miles every week without feeling so bad, too!

Let me know of any simple suggestions you have for making another small step in the right direction. If we get enough then there might be a feature with credits in a future Home Farmer and the makings of a fine campaign the next time government feels like collecting our suggestions.