ISN’T IT nice to see daylight at 5.30pm again? The lengthening days and the recent balmy weather are calling me out of the city into the countryside.

Spring really does feel just round the corner, and with spring, as every pre-school child knows, come skipping lambs and newborn calves. Except that you will be hard-pressed to find either in much of our countryside.

The fields of England are noticeably quieter and emptier of animals than they were a couple of decades ago. There has been a steady depopulation of our countryside that, other than in farming circles, has gone mainly unnoticed, apart from the columns of smoke rising from our fields in 2001, the year of foot and mouth disease, when a sizable proportion of the national herd was slaughtered and thrown on to hideous gigantic bonfires.

But that isn’t the main problem.

Most of the farms that saw their animals burnt restocked. The decline had set in before 2001 and is not caused by disease, but economics. It is also the explanation of why we are finding so much horsemeat in our pre-packed and ready cooked meals.

Every big supermarket chain and food product company will tell you they are always looking at ways of bringing more value for customers by bringing down prices. To do that, they have to cut what they pay to the food suppliers; that is the farmers and the abattoirs.

But animal foodstuffs such as cereals have soared in price. The farmers are caught in a two-way squeeze, from the big buyers cutting what they pay and the foodstuffs merchants charging more.

So they put up the price of their animals for the supermarkets and food companies, who say it’s too expensive and look abroad for cheaper animals.

Eventually, there comes a point when the UK farmer is paying out more than he gets in and has to sell off his animals at whatever price he can get and see his pastureland turned into wheat and barley fields. The number of animal farmers to have left the industry since 2001 is huge.

The abattoirs can cut what they pay the farmer for the animals they kill, which only puts more farmers out of business.

Or the abattoirs can, as we are discovering, not only buy beef cattle but supplement them with horsemeat.

So finally, we have a situation where the big supermarkets and food product companies are scouring the world for the farmer or abattoir offering the cheapest price for its meat, and if they don’t ask the right questions about what’s in the mince or meat, we end up with some very strange ‘beef’ dishes on our supermarket shelves and an empty countryside.

So what can we, the customer for whose benefit that whole appalling situation has been created, do to bring animals back to our fields?

I had beef mince yesterday. I know it didn’t have horse in it because I bought it from my local butcher, who prepares it himself, and I can assure you, he didn’t have a horse tied up round the back door awaiting its fate.

I wouldn’t buy mince in any form these days from a supermarket. I don’t trust it or any food product company to ask the right questions about what’s in the mince.

They have to convince me that I will get what it says on the packet before I will go back to their fresh meat and ready-made cabinets.

So convince us, supermarkets and food companies of the UK. Buy British at a fair price and show us the food chain in transparent detail right back to the cow in the British field.

Then you really will be giving the customer value for money.