France’s presidential pretenders will this week make mandatory campaign stops at the annual Paris farm fair as polls show farmers increasingly tempted by the far-right’s Marine Le Pen when they even bother to vote at all. Though only a fraction of the population still works in the farm sector, voters remain attached to the country’s agrarian roots, making the annual agriculture fair a fixture of the political calendar.

An East Anglian land college has continued to boost its farming content with the arrival of a herd of cattle at its Otley campus. Andrew Vernon picks up the Red Poll cattle destined for the Otley campus of Easton and Otley College from Euston.

But, rather than plastic, it uses a mixture of bamboo and cassava, crops that are widely found across the country. But, like many other countries in the region, it’s been slow to try to combat the millions of tons of trash produced each year.

Despite the ANC and President Jacob Zuma hyping up the return of land late last year and during a statement on January 8, his state of the nation address this week contained hardly any new initiatives. Expanding on Zuma’s speech, Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti told City Press on Thursday night that they were working to fundamentally change the structure of the system, the patterns of ownership and the control of the economy.

There has been a sudden burst of interest from top Scottish politicians in this year’s NFU Scotland’s AGM, annual dinner and conference in Glasgow in a fortnight’s time. If a six-way battle for inclusion in the organisation’s own top team wasn’t enough excitement to fuel the two-day event, the ongoing battle for hearts and minds over the Brexit issue has also galvanised big hitters from the Scottish Parliament to take the opportunity to address what is likely to be the farming industry’s most talked-about bash of the year.