Beef, badgers and belching cows in Somerset

It's like the Bath & West Show without hot tubs.

Or Human Cannonballs.

But still plenty of rain, and beautiful, groomed and primped cattle.

The Winter Fair is very much the Farmer's Fair. A huge shed full of the best cows, sheep and tractors in the South West, and a sea of waxed jackets and weathered faces.

It's held at Junction 24, the new livestock auction centre they built at, erm, Junction 24 of the M5. Direct people, farmers.

The show itself was heaving. I was reminded again that farmers live in a parallel universe to other businesses. Auctioneers told me that 2009 had been "a good year, sometimes a great year". Prices are up, plenty of animals are coming to market. Partly because the weak pound has made British beef and lamb relatively cheaper than Irish, partly because when times get tough, food always does well.

But you'll always hear grumbling about the Three B's of Beef.

Badgers are first. Type "badgers, cattle, TB" into a search engine, and you'll see why. Bovine TB is still the No 1 headache for a beef or dairy farmer, striking apparently at random, decimating perfectly healthy herds. It's heart-breaking, and commercially disastrous. Is it the badgers' fault? Everyone here thinks so, and they want to see proper vaccinations, and culling of diseased badgers.

"Who's killing the most badgers?" the man from the National Beef Association asks me. "Not farmers, but Hilary Benn (the environment minister). He's the one allowing thousands more badgers to get ill. He should cut out the cancer once and for all."

There are several other sides to this argument, but I won't hear them here. Animal welfare charities rarely take a stall at a cattle market.

I run into the dynamic Derek Mead, known to everyone in the trade, and never short of an opinion. He set up Junction 24 and he's president of the Winter Fair. And he's talking about my second B.

"Brazilian beef is coming back," Derek warns a friend of his. South American beef has been largely banned in the EU following concerns over foot and mouth on the continent. But now, Derek hears, it's on the way back.

"They'll let in meat from 800 farms first, but before you know it it'll all be in. And they've got all five varieties of foot and mouth, it should be banned outright until it's clean."

Brazilian beef is also, of course, dramatically cheaper than British.

My third B that gets cattle farmers going is usually 'Bureaucrats', but today it's been usurped.

"Belching. Would you believe it?"

Christopher Thomas-Everard, Exmoor cattle man and a big noise on the National Beef Assoc, has been studying gas. As the world turns to Copenhagen for climate change solutions, emissions from cattle have attracted attention.

Methane, from either end of a cow, is much stronger than CO2 as a global warming gas. So beef and dairy farmers have been painted as worse than a belching power station. But their critics forget the grass, Mr Thomas-Everard points out.

"Just this week Sydney University has discovered that close-cropped turf, which puts down deep roots, captures more methane in a day than a cow emits in a year."

He's thrilled. A lively countryman who started farming in 1966, Christopher can't believe he's ended up an expert in, well, bovine emissions.

But they've always said a good farmer can turn his hand to anything, haven't they?