Mr Stuart Agnew, MEP for the Eastern Counties, has expressed his views on organic farming and is clearly not impressed. I would ask Mr Agnew to take a more informed approach before dismissing organic farming by looking at some of the many highly successful organic systems that abound - many of which exist in his constituency.
Rather than being fools eastern counties organic farmers are resilient and innovative and producing high quality produce that isn't "submerged in thistles, plastered with fungus or crawling with aphids" as Mr Agnew suggests.
The likelihood of a crop having a high thistle population and high aphid numbers is low as flowering plants within the crop will attract the predator species which feed on the aphids. His comments sound more like ill-informed speculation than genuine observation.
Mr Agnew would be welcome to visit some organic farms in the eastern counties to discover the many benefits organic systems can deliver and why it is a farming system which should be taken seriously by policy makers and not dismissed as foolish.
