Here, where I live, the dawn air is suffused with the delicate yet distinctly, sweetly acrid scent of slurry from the silage-fed, indoor-housed, milk-laden cows; it is filled with the low insistent hum of the milking machines and the repeated clonk-clunk-clonk of the yard scraper, as the amber fingers of the sodium lights break gently over the asbestos rooves of the industrial cattle barns, and the mist hangs low over the gently murmuring, phosphate-laden, fish-denying streams.
Elsewhere confident farmers deliver for society or ask, can we really carry on with farming as it is?
