Farming, Fishing, Food

Farming, Fishing & Food Manufacturers

Better Animal Welfare. More Organic Crops. 

FUND RESEARCH INTO
BETTER LIVESTOCK WELFARE ON FARMS 

..."What ... learn could even change the way we house and treat these creatures."... like goats, pigs and cows.
..."“If we don’t understand how these animals think, then we won’t understand what they need,” says Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist (a zoologist who studies the behavior of animals in their natural habitats. Type of: animal scientist)
at Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology 
(address 
Wilhelm-Stahl-Allee 2,
18196 Dummerstorf
Germany 
“And if we don’t understand what they need, we can’t design better environments for them.”... 
..."researchers at FBN and elsewhere have shown that pigs show signs of empathy,
goats rival dogs in some tests of
social intelligence"...
..."There are an estimated 78 billion farm animals on Earth—a number that dwarfs monkeys, rodents, and humans combined—and we have lived with them longer than any other creature save dogs."... 

..."Annkatrin Pahl, the Ph.D. student leading ... project. On a real farm, she explains, farmers move dairy cows around multiple times a year, disrupting their social groups. Are they also breaking up besties?"... "After identifying each cow’s ostensible best friend and worst enemy, Pahl brings the pairs into an open arena. In a recent trial, “enemy” cows began head butting. But when one was placed with her friend, the two began grooming each other and following each other around."... "“If a farmer knows which of his cows like each other, it might be better to keep them together when moving the herd around,” Langbein says. He’s not just speaking academically. Langbein trained as a cattle breeder 40 years ago, and he’s especially sensitive to the housing conditions on modern dairy farms, where animals are often tied up for long stretches or confined to tight pens."...



END GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS AND GENE EDITED CROPS ON UK FARMS 

      • Background
      • At the moment Tories not going to label Gene Edited food you buy. 

      • Tory government's UK’s Food Standards Agency will create a public register of gene-edited organisms, which supermarkets could consult if they wish to work with their supply chains and opt-out of stocking gene-edited product. It remains unclear how costly that would be.


The main GM (genetically modified) crops, maize (corn) and soybean, are used mostly for feeding animals. Meat, milk and eggs from animals fed with GM crops are eaten by people in many countries including the UK.

Of the UK supermarkets, only Waitrose commits to ensuring non-GM feed is used to produce its eggs, chicken, turkey, farmed fish and New Zealand lamb. 
Source The Royal Society uk 



COUNTY FARMS 

  • No more sale of county farms owned by councils, which is sole way for people to affordably rent farms.

      • Background

        • More than 50 per cent have disappeared over the past 40 years, that includes 15,000 acres lost in the past decade, 60 per cent of which was sold off in the past two years. 
        • Examples are county farms rented from councils who interplant apple trees with arable crops, with a farm shop selling their fruit and vegetables as well as local sourced meat and produce. 
Source: Daily Telegraph article Sunday 15 December 2019,
entitled Half of county farm sold off by cash-strapped councils
  • All county farms to be organic. 

  • Equipped county farms to let. 

  • Private and family business as well as community enterprises. 

  • Make county farms trust ownership by councils, so can never be sold off. 
  • Stop building on greenbelt. 

  • Convert farm buildings to rented social housing for the farmer renting the county farm. 

  • Longer Farm Business Tenancies than now. 


FARM FUNDING 
• Ensure EU funding for fishing and farming is replaced by UK government funding. 


TREES

• Work with farmers and foresters to plant and maintain long-term maintained, millions of UK native tree species to better flood management.


NO WASTE 
• Sell wonky fruit and vegetable in the farm shop and to restaurants. 


SAVE THE BEES 
• Prohibit neonicotinoids pesticides on farm crops, to protect the bees. 

• Have a strip of land all around a crop field, of wildflower meadow to help save the bees. 

• Subsidise organic farming better. This also saves bees, bumblebees and butterflies.

• Not permit farmland to be completely covered by solar panels. To those already lost to that, take out every other row of solar panels and put organic wildflower meadow between them, to help save the bees. 

• Work with farmers for field boundaries to return to hedgerows to help wildlife such as bees, hedgehogs and dormouse, to work towards 40 per cent more hedgerows than today. Hedgerows protect soil, clean the air and absorb carbon emissions, according to the CPRE countryside charity. 


 FARM WORKERS 

  • Re-instate the Agricultural Wages Board to underpin employment standards and wages, to UK farm workers and seasonal workers. 

  • Permit EU workers (fully able to speak English, so can speak to each other and farmer, so not exploited labour) employed across farming, fishing and food manufacturing to do their seasonal work in UK, reinstating the
    Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme.
  • But ensuring the caravans they temporarily live in, are of a habitable standard. 

      • Background -
        • Back in August 2021 there were in excess of 500,000 job vacancies left unfilled, out of 4.1m roles in farming.
        • Back in 2021, 35,000 healthy pigs had to be culled due to lack of workers. This also shows we cannot fill the jobs with the mostly Muslim asylum seekers. 

(Source: Tory government
The Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs committee report


RURAL POLICE SERVICE 

  • More Rural police stations, or mobile Police Posts. Specialist trained officers. 

  • Resurrect Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill 2022  (abandoned in 2023) giving Police new powers to protect from dangerous and out of control dogs and adding llamas, ostriches and game birds on farms, to sheep worrying:
     
  • wildlife theft, 
  • sheep worrying, 
  • livestock rustling, 
  • to ensure no fox hunting across public and private lands, 
  • as well as against hare coursing and cock fighting. 


CHICKEN FARMING 

  • End chicken factory farming. 

  • End 'Frankenchickens’ selective breeding of fast growing chickens, causes them dire health problems in their brief life before slaughter. 

  • Commit to Better Chicken Commitment, which  is a welfare policy that aims to:
    •  drastically reduce the suffering of broiler chickens 
    • by giving them more enrichment, natural light and space 
    • alongside the introduction of less painful methods of slaughter, 
    • third-party auditing, and 
    • the prohibition of fast-growing breeds.

  • In-ovo sexing technology allows the sex of chicks to be identified while they are still inside their eggs, at an early stage of their development before they’re able to feel pain. So millions fewer male chicks would be born, meaning they would no longer be routinely killed at just a few hours old.

      • Background 
• Animal Equality produced an in-depth report on new technology called ‘in-ovo sexing’.

• Thanks to Animal Equality, Coop - which is the largest supermarket in Italy - and Assoavi - the largest trade association of egg producers in Italy - both committed in 2020 to introduce in-ovo sexing technology. Thanks to these agreements alone, five million chicks a year will already be saved as of 2022, long before the new amendment to the law passed by the Italian Parliament actually goes into effect (2026).


LIVESTOCK TRANSPORT AND ABATTOIRS
Resurrect Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill abandoned by Tories in 2023

• End halal and kosher cruel butchering of livestock in UK and not transport livestock for such butchering abroad. 
 
• End live exports for butchering and fattening of farm animals.

• Shorten journeys of livestock taken to UK abattoirs. 

  • Although live exports of livestock for slaughter will not happen, support frozen butchered meat traded abroad from British farms and abattoirs. 


LIVESTOCK CRUELTY 
• End ability to farm if convicted of animal cruelty. 


BADGER CULL 

• Cease badger cull. 
  • Research TB vaccines for wild badgers. 


FOOD IMPORT 
AND EXPORT

• Ensure food deals of UK for imports from the world, set the highest standards in food quality and animal welfare. 

• Look into food, farm and fishing export deals with each individual EU and non-EU European country and around the world. 

• Expand the role of the Groceries Code Adjudicator to ensure suppliers and consumers get a fair deal. 

• Help funding towards smaller traders. 
FOOD MANUFACTURERS 

• Work with food manufacturers and retailers to reduce waste, including plastic bottle waste.
 
• Pass law to enshrine Right to Food. 

• Pass law for supermarkets to ensure all surplus food goes to food banks, and to such as the Real Junk Food restaurant systems. 



FISHING 

• Establish a Science Innovation Fund, working with farmers and fishers, that will include support for our small-scale fishing fleet. 

• Safeguard habitats and species in the blue belts of the seas and oceans surrounding our island. 

  • Absorb RNLI lifeboats, who rely only on charitable donations, into a fully funded, direct-employed Coast Guard, to save people from drowning at sea. Giving current RNLI volunteers who wish, first offer of those new full-time jobs. Also part-time or full-time as voluntarily wish, out of season work for fishermen.


AQUACULTURE 

• This is the breeding, raising and harvesting of fish. Research better ways to do that. 

• Support breeding, raising and harvesting shellfish. 

• Support farming aquatic plants like seaweed. 

• Fund research into UK lab-grown fish to make fish fillets. 

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