I ENJOYED Graham Jones’s article (“Dividing the sheep from the, er, weighted sheep”, TES, February 1). But his farmer brother might have mentioned that the new subsidy system does give him more money if he can keep his flocks of sheep from jumping over the fences and straying on to the highway, and he also gets more than he used to for taking them to market. We hope we are rewarding farmers for good husbandry.
Some of us remember the old system, where income depended on the number of animals in the fields on one particular day in the autumn, and smaller animals weren’t counted at all. Farmers complained about that system, too.
Geoff Daniels Assistant Director Funding Policy and Development Learning and Skills Council
