SIR,

Recently I sat down and studied my Carbon Audit which was completed late autumn last year.

The first thing I noticed was a figure of 276,791kg Co2 for spreading lime. We had put on a large amount of lime that year.

The harvest was exceptionally wet and I estimate that to dry our grain we used 10 times more diesel than the year before when much of our grain was harvested at under 14%. We had to use the plough in the autumn to establish our crops- normally all min-till. The previous winter was our hedge cutting year - more diesel used. If we had done our Carbon Audit the year before we would have had a totally different result basically to produce the same amount of produce.

The Government should realise that the only people making money out of this are the technical Wizkid’s because it certainly isn’t helping the farmer, and the recommendations for improvement - most farmers have been striving to reduce their costs since they started farming, otherwise, they would no longer be farming.

The editor asks where all the information from various audits including Carbon Audits end up. I would suggest for Carbon Audits eventually in the bin because as I have pointed out they are too variable.

Stephen Withers