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Farming Today: 19/05/20 - The badger cull, micro-rewildling and frost-hit vineyards.

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19/05/20 - The badger cull, micro-rewildling and frost-hit vineyards.

BBC Radio 4 - Farming Today, 19/05/20 - The badger cull, micro-rewildling and frost-hit vineyards.

The latest twists and turns on the badger cull.

A ‘stop’ order on the badger cull in Derbyshire, but new licenses granted. What is the government up to?

The Government’s announced it’s granting seven new supplementary badger cull licenses in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall - these allow culling to carry on after an initial 4-year cull is over. Some conservationists are surprised by the move because back in March DEFRA said it was going to move away from culling, and use vaccination instead. This latest news comes as legal challenges brought by the NFU against the scrapping of the badger cull in Derbyshire, were dismissed in a judicial review. The judge said that while farmers in Derbyshire had satisfied all the criteria to get a cull licence, the U-turn was not unlawful because the government was allowed to prevent Natural England issuing the licence, for ‘political’ reasons. The decision to not grant a cull in Derbyshire was made after the Prime Minister’s partner Carrie Symonds met Dominic Dyer, Head of the Badger Trust. Anna Hill speaks to Dominic Dyer about that chat.

All this week we’re taking a look at land use….what we farm where, and why some land might not be farmed at all. It might be argued, that re-wilding is in that last category: at its most extreme it means taking all human intervention away from the land, and even reintroducing some species. But could some re-wilding work alongside agriculture, and even pay? And is the new idea of micro-rewilding, such as a plan to bring back insects, more acceptable? 

And late frosts have hit vineyards across the country - we visit one in East Yorkshire and speak to another, which is planting thousands of new vines despite the weather!

Presented by Anna Hill
Produced by Heather Simons

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19/05/20 - The badger cull, micro-rewildling and frost-hit vineyards.

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