09/11/26 Midges and bluetongue; COP31 food & farming; root veg.

Great Britain has seen its worst ever outbreak of the livestock disease bluetongue this year, described to MPs earlier this week at the Environment Food and Rural Affairs committee as “a major animal welfare crisis”. Across Great Britain there’ve been ten times more cases - that’s farms affected by the disease - in the 2026 ‘bluetongue season’ than there were last year, leading to a severe shortage of vaccine and long delays in getting test results.

Bluetongue is a disease spread by midges which are far less active through the winter, so the disease tends to die down, (though just this week there’ve been new cases in Lancashire and Cumbria.) And there’s a question over whether infected midges could survive winter and continue to spread the disease come spring.

Dr Marion England is a Research Fellow in Vector Ecology at the Pirbright Institute and she met our reporter Sarah Swadling on one of 6 farms where they're trapping and monitoring midges.

The UN's annual climate conference, COP, this year COP31, begins in Turkey, with agriculture high on the agenda from the start. World leaders, ministers and negotiators will spend the next two weeks discussing how countries respond to climate change, with farming discussions focused on food security, water management, climate resilience and the role agriculture can play in cutting emissions.

It's the season for British root vegetables, carrots, parsnips, celeriac and neeps. We're virtually self sufficient in some veg like carrots, but a summer of drought and heat waves means some produce, especially parsnips, have struggled.