Devon farmer Richard Haddock says the Government’s badger cull scheme is deeply flawed.

I was talking to one of our farm shop customers the other day and the subject of TB came up. I mentioned the fact that we'd had it on the farm and that it had cost me the best part of £100,000.

"But farmers are compensated, aren't they?" she said.

I explained the ramifications of that: that compensation is paid only on animals which have to be slaughtered. There is no compensation for the farmer who has to take a massive hit on the value of the rest of his herd when they come to be sold. Neither is there any compensation for the loss of the calves the slaughtered cows might be carrying.

She said she had no idea things were so complicated. Now, I don't blame her for that. After all, I have very little idea of how things can be in many other sectors, from education to aviation.

But it does demonstrate quite what a problem farmers are facing as the public is given a window into their world as the badger/TB issue moves towards a very high- profile, government-backed 'solution'.

Make no mistake about it, in the weeks to come everyone from the League Against Cruel Sports upwards will be pouring money into discrediting the government's proposals for trial culling of badgers in places where TB is seriously threatening to put an end to all livestock farming.

Unfortunately farmers can't use that possibility as an argument to support the cull because it is still only a theoretical outcome – though one that grows more likely with every fresh outbreak of TB that is confirmed.

But as someone who has had a very close encounter with TB and experienced its devastating financial and emotional impact I have to announce today that I cannot support the cull plan as set out in black and white. Because its whole rationale is severely flawed.

There are glaring errors in the planning of the practicalities, the result, I suspect, of allowing that nest of interfering know-nothings Natural England to have an input. Farmers will be expected to organise the shooting of badgers at a time when summer vegetation makes the animals most difficult to spot. They will not be able to shoot them near their setts – the most obvious place. They will, instead, have to clear areas nearby of vegetation in order to create killing grounds.

Presumably they will have to deliver notes to the badgers asking them politely to go and stand in these cleared areas, when the animals' natural wariness would normally lead them to avoid such places.

But the greatest, most glaring fault is that the shooting will not discriminate between healthy and infected badgers. The plan is for a blanket killing of all badgers in a designated area. Now, in a locality where I live where there is a headland bounded by river, sea and housing, that's not so much of a problem.

But I fail to see how the operation is going to work where there are no such physical boundaries, and where a badger – infected or otherwise – could easily elude the hunters and take refuge in the adjoining, non-culling zone.

But it's the indiscriminate nature of the cull that worries me – and many other farmers – most. Because the last thing we want to do is to take out healthy badgers. Badger populations are self-policing. Diseased badgers are routinely turned out once they are perceived as a threat to a healthy community.

Because of their debilitated condition they are unable to dig fresh setts as deeply as healthy badgers. Such locations are easily identifiable – and once they are found in theory it is a simple matter to put the animals quietly to sleep using exhaust fumes. No shooting. No disturbance. No spreading of the disease.

At the very least we should be pressing for the government to allow a trial of this method to run in parallel with the culling. The expertise certainly exists, gassing has worked in the past and is a more humane method of dealing with TB-infected badgers.

It is also one which, I suggest, would be far easier to sell to the public, because it would only be humanely killing badgers which otherwise are going to die slow and distressing deaths from the effects of TB.

At the very least we must give this alternative method a fair chance, but the problem is that there is no official support for it. Certainly not from the NFU, which has thrown its weight behind the trial cull partly because it is based on 'science', partly because after years of a worsening TB epidemic the union is grateful for anything which looks as though it will provide a solution.

The last thing it is going to do now is to suggest that that science is flawed, or call for a halt while alternatives are explored. Yet I would suggest the science certainly is – as I have shown – woefully lacking. And that for the sake of badgers, cattle, and the public standing of farmers an alternative plan must be given a fair appraisal.