Clucking Hell

Rejoice chickens! From midnight tonight all throughout the EU you shall be free as the European Union has banned battery hen cages.  Well. Kinda.

Now I am all for an end to all intensive farming and battery hen egg production in particular. I keep chickens and they are all ex-battery hens that I get from the folks at the British Hen Welfare Trust. When you get your hens they look bloody awful, weak legs, most of their feathers missing and looking like the inhabitants of some avian Bergen-Belsen. The good news is that with a bit of feeding, running around and time they get back most of their feathers and soon start pecking, scratching, having dust baths and generally doing that chickeny thing. Oh and the eggs taste better than anything you'll get in the supermarkets too so they well pay you back for your £5 a bird donation.

Soeven though I'll probably have to source my chucks from elsewhere in the future I'll be a happy dragon if I know there aren't going to be any more fucked up featherless chickens, so (grits teeth) well done EU.

Ah, no, actually strike that... not so well done after all:

[Jane Howarth, from the British Hen Welfare Trust] said: "The British egg industry has really stepped up to the mark and they are ready. But at the moment we're looking at a situation where there could be 80 million hens still in illegal cages in Europe."

...

Agriculture Minister Jim Paice said: "It is unacceptable that after the ban on battery cages comes into effect, millions of hens across Europe will still remain in poor conditions.
"We have all had plenty of time to make these changes, but 13 EU nations have not done so. The UK egg industry alone has spent £400million ensuring hens live in better conditions.

So as ever the UK has rolled over to the mighty EU and done everything our master in Brussels have told us to do but 13 countries out of 27, nearly half the EU,  have just gone "fuck you" and carried on just as they bloody well please.

And do you know what the EU will do about that? Sweet fuck all, that's what.

And do you know what the EU will do if we have the temerity to ban egg imports from those 13 countries? Fine the shit out of us for daring to break trading rules no doubt.

As millions will be saying at new years eve parties throughout the land tonight "Do you think we can just leave yet?"

"Cluck, motherfucker"

Thirsty

Well down here behind the water pipes in Norfolk I can't help noticing that there's not so much water in said pipes at the moment and al-ja-beeba tells me this morning that we are officially in drought.

Well yes it has been dry, the paddocks look like shite (not got any horses on them at the moment which is lucky or they would be going hungry) and all my lettuce and rocket keeps bolting to seed but the cool stuff is still coming out of the taps for now.

Apparently the practical upshot of this "official drought" is that farmers won't be able to abstract as much water out of the rivers to water crops. Interestingly that doesn't seem to be much of a problem for the farmers around where the dragon's lair is as they aren't watering their crops that much. Normally the diesel pumps would be running 24/7 this time of year if they were growing their normal potato crop but everyone seems to have switched to wheat and its not hard to see why:


The price of wheat for forward delivery (that's essentially what a "future" is - a contract to deliver wheat at a set price at a future date) had doubled in the past year so it's natural that they're going to grow what makes the most money.

Shame though - there were always a few maris pipers left over after the harvest that if you wanted to you'd never need to buy a potato again.