----- Original Message -----
From: ...

Originally from: <...>
To: <...>
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 4:49 PM
Subject: Re: [farmtalking] Fear of the Internet

Dear All,

I do not feel that having confrontations on chat sites is necessarily a
bad
thing, providing the criticism is accurate and does not become 'personal'.

In this respect, I feel that I have had every right to defend my true
position whenever I have been false accused over the last few days.
Inaccurate and
personal comments should be debarred from posting at the start, then no
childish
stupidity is going to ensue.

The core of my issue is not about my own subjective grievances over the
refusal of BCMS to grant a calf passport to me and whether I am prepared
to use the
internet to communicate, but it is about the far more serious and far
reachingdemise of the smaller farmer and the misguided New Labour policy
to
'restructure agriculture' and 'depopulate livestock' as Nick Brown himself
had stated.
Any opportunity for the seemingly legitimate slaughter of livestock has
been
grasped since New labour have come to power – TB , BSE cohorts, the
national
scrapie plan ( or whatever it is called ) and now those late passport
application animals get committed to the slaughter squad. 170 cows a day
are being
slaughtered at bridgewater abbattoir for TB alone – yet nobody is trying
to
identify the true cause – which would put us in a better position to curb
the
outbreak of the disease – same issue with BSE too.

As i have said before, this is an appalling waste of food resources when
we
have so many in the world short of food.

Some of you may have read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where the US
gov
literally bulldoze out whole swaths of farmers who could not pay their
rent,
etc. Today we have a similar situation , except it is an insidious
metaphysical
bureaucratic bulldozer that is undermining the very cornerstones of our
businesses and driving us beyond breaking point. No one considers the
psychological stress that one endures whilst trying to keep the everyday
activities of the
farm going, yet simultaneously having to deal with all of this government
contrived mandatory hype. Almost 75% of the farmers have got divorced in
my area
since foot and mouth.

It is all designed to wear us down , until we throw up the towel. It is
breaking the best of us.

I started up farming with one acre in the mid 1970s, and have worked for
every penny I own. I am passionately attached to the small farming
lifestyle, and
am therefore experiencing chronic emotional pain at having to witness the
current state of affairs and the hopeless prospects for our future under
New
Labour and their multinational corporate paymasters. Whilst it might be
the 50–150
acre farms which they want gone today, it will be the 1000 acre folks that
get
targeted tomorrow.

Best,

mark purdey

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