My year started very well with a nice heifer calf born on New Year's Day - hope it is a good omen for the future! But with the politicians weaving their web, and what's gone on in the world recently, I doubt it very much.

Mr Blair and Mr Mandelson playing around in Brussels, EU agricultural budgets, what have they given away - a lot of the farming budget - and nobody has really realised yet!

Modulation could be at 15% within a couple of years and match funded by UK government. Well, the money they have used to match fund it they have given away, thank you Mr Labour party! So modulation could be at 30% with no match funding just so that the budget in the UK can stay as it is. The more people that go into ELS and environmental schemes will put more and more strain on that and modulation will have to increase. We know we are going to have a 6% cut for appeals, and it could be more than that, depending on how many more appeals there are. We have only just learnt, and the letter was dated 6.6.05, about whether foot and mouth year was going to be taken out of our SFP.

How many more people are waiting to hear, because RPA don't do recorded delivery as we have to, and the post gets lost? How can we fill our forms in if we haven't had all our paperwork cleared for our second year of SFP in May 06, as there is a sentence there that says "fill in to the best of your knowledge". How can we do that when we don't know what we are supposed to get in 2005? We are in a mess, we have just had a proper agricultural reform.

Our government is cutting us again and again. The French don't have modulation, and the French don't start their SFP package until 2006. Back in November, 2004, I, as National Livestock chairman, made it quite clear to the NFU and other organisations that we should defer the SFP until 2006, because they wouldn't have the paperwork sorted, they wouldn't have the computer programmes, and they wouldn't be able to pay us. I wish someone would prove me wrong. The leadership in all farming organisations said everything would be OK on the day. Dream on! The livestock industry has had to suffer the biggest cut in support payments, and then they expect the farmers to go along with TB.

The government expect the farmers to pay for the pre movement testing which is supposed to start on the 20.2.06, and they expect to cut our compensation for the disease when this and other governments have done nothing to stop the spread of TB.

Then they decide to go to consultation, when many farmers are telling them how to combat the disease. If they want a working partnership they will have to listen to us and stop going to consultation when things don't go their way.

We have to have a new leadership or a very strong leadership within the NFU to make sure the government knows the views in the farming community and the anger, the real anger, over this. If the leadership can't relay this then we may have to get a new team that can! We cannot take any more cost cuts or financial burden in the livestock sector. Likewise, how on earth can they lift the OTMS without having the Date Based Export Scheme in place, and why are we, a single country, being excluded from a common market without a compensation scheme in place?

The DBES has already slipped from the beginning to the end of March, maybe longer. Why is there nothing in place to take these animals off the market until we are able to trade within Europe? There are about 15,000 carcases ( post '96) waiting in storage to come out into the food chain in January. What is that going to do to the normal beef market and distort it? WHY is nobody listening, my livestock board have made it quite clear to government and in Brussels and we are being totally ignored. The NFU has to learn a new word - "No".

We cannot go on killing our cows for the sake of TB when the government is not tackling the wildlife. I have never seen so much anger within the livestock sector, and where does all the second-class wheat and barley go? Who are the biggest financial contributors and membership within the farming organisations? The livestock sector.

When are the retailers going to wake up to reality, and, yes, Shaun McCurley of Tesco's made it quite clear that the prices being paid today are unsustainable, so what are they doing about it? We know the base price for beef this spring has to be £2.20, we know it has to move to £2.40-£2.50 by the end of the year. This price was paid back in October '95 before the BSE crisis. Can someone please elaborate on this? Food is far, far too cheap, how on earth can the environment cope? We have to do a much better job in getting the message over to the consumer. It is time the RSPB, English Nature, and the National Trust, who all told the government we should go to area payments for farming, stood up as well. They are just beginning to see that all these cuts in Pillar 2 and environmental schemes are going to dig into what they work for.

All these different organisations are going to have to work together. We know we are not all going to agree on everything, but we all have to work with the consumer and tell them what's going on, and forget the politicians, the public will sort them out for us. Shortages are coming to haunt the government; we've already had fuel and gas. I warned them four years ago about food shortages in Europe and this country. We the farmers cannot just turn the tap on and off.