Parish Council meeting, 1st June, 2010

I attended the Parish Council meeting last night, in order to hear what Velmur Ltd had to say about their proposals for a CAFO in South Witham - it was an interesting meeting, to say the least.

The joint proposers of the CAFO are Buckminster Estates, who were represented, on the night, by their Estates Manager (I'm sorry, I didn't catch his name but when I find it, I'll update this post).

The meeting started with a presentation from the guys from Velmur Ltd which lasted about 45 minutes - Councillor Martin Wilkins (Parish Council Chairman) has asked for that presentation electronically, so hopefully it will be made available on this blog in due course. After the presentation was over, Martin began the response, and there followed an hour of energetic debate, which, from my perspective, appeared to leave many questions unanswered and, before they left, both Buckminster Estates and the Velmur Ltd team were left in no doubt, as to the strength of opposition to their proposals.

Some of the higlights of the debate were:

• Velmur Ltd stated that there is a milk shortage in this country, which is made up by imports - it's actually more complex than that given that the EU operates milk quotas and that, whilst the UK under achieves on it's quotas, so do almost all other EU bloc countries, except for the four largest milk producers.
• There will be an odour issue, but Velmur Ltd were unwilling to be specific about it. Although they made great efforts to talk about their Anaerobic Digesters which house the slurry, when pressed, they were unable to rebutt the fact that the slurry does not go straight from the cow to the Anaerobic Digester and therefore there will, without question, be an odour issue.
• Velmur Ltd are a "shell" company - incorporated on 11th November, 2008 and yet to file any accounts, according to Companies House - hardly a pedigree that instils trust.
• Whilst acknowledging that there are obvious animal welfare issues, they were put to one side by the Parish Council, purely on the basis that they have no bearing on the planning applications process.
• Allegedly, other sites have been considered by Velmur Ltd, but, despite the regulations in the USA requiring these farms to be at least four and in some cases, eight miles away from human habitation, due to public health issues, Velmur Ltd still want to develop this farm, which is one third the size of the whole village, right alongside South Witham, within 300m of the nearest houses.

The CAFO proposers will be back at the Village Hall on Monday 7th June, 2010 at 7pm to present the same pitch to the residents of the village. A significant turnout at that meeting, will send an even firmer message to the proposers, that they are not welcome in our village.