Farmers are notoriously reluctant correspondents, and, as an agricultural columnist, my mailbox is not often full to overflowing, and that goes for the electronic one, as well as the wooden box on the wall of my cottage.

But just in the last few weeks, several items of interest have arrived in the post, which I thought I might share with you.

The first was a copy of a little book written by John Carter, who used to keep all those outdoor sows alongside the A30 at Fairmile, east of Exeter, and who is now still farming, albeit on a much reduced scale, at Yarcombe on the other side of Honiton.

It is called Both in it Together – A Farmer's Life with Foxes and it provides a compelling account of the love-hate relationship between the farmer and the fox.

John says that he wrote it partly because the fox was getting a bad press, and partly because farmers were as well.

"Most of us try to farm sympathetically with nature and nature puts up a pretty good struggle in the process," he explains.

"The fox is a good example of this struggle and a sneaking regard for him and his cunning causes a smile to pass across even the hardest farmer's face. I thought that my experiences and feelings might help people to understand what is a complicated relationship."

Not that John Carter is a hard-faced farmer, or a hard-hearted one, if it comes to that. But having spent a working lifetime trying to rear piglets from 600 outdoor sows and lambs from 1,000 ewes, he knows a thing or two about foxes and their habits.

He tells a story of how a fox took a chunk out of the shoulder of a live shearling ewe, trapped in the snow (she survived) and confesses to being baffled by their tendency to kill for the sheer fun of it, of which he gives plenty of gruesome examples.

But through it all there is a strong vein of respect for the cool disdain that foxes invariably display when confronted with human beings, and above all for their ability to survive, which, as he rightly observes, is something they share with farmers. It is a delightful as well as an instructive read, and is available at £5.50 from johncarter1437@btinternet.com.

Then there was the package that arrived from Roy Halliwell in Taunton. He is one of a group of retired scientists and industrialists who have produced a design for what they call a "21st century renewable energy eco-farm."

The basic concept is that you keep a large herd of dairy and beef cattle on the ground floor of a gigantic marquee, and then use the methane and heat from the animals to produce various forms of energy in the space above. The "farm" would be entirely self-sufficient and would, they reckon, produce enough energy to power a 5,000-home eco-village just outside Taunton.

Quite how practical all of this might be, I am not really qualified to judge. But the principle of turning the methane which grazing livestock will inevitably produce from a climate-changing liability to an energy-providing asset is surely a sound one.

The next communication to catch my eye was an e-mail from Andrew Mitchell, who farms near Beaminster in West Dorset. He, or rather his wife Patricia, runs a farmhouse bed and breakfast business, and like other similar operators in the area have been knocked sideways by a letter from West Dorset District Council informing them that the annual charge for testing their private water supply is to rise from £80 to £1,100.

He sent me a copy of a blistering letter that he had written to West Dorset's chief executive, pointing out that the proposed charges were not, as the council had claimed, set by the Government, but were the maximum that councils were allowed to charge, if indeed they chose to charge at all. It seems to have done the trick. West Dorset is having a rethink, but we don't know yet what the outcome will be – and I strongly suggest that other farm tourism providers in other districts should be on their guard.

Then, finally, there was a letter from my old friend Paul Gluyas, from Stithians in Cornwall. Paul went clear of TB in February this year, after being under restriction for all but 11 months of the last eight years. He has worked out that the four TB tests a year to which the farm has been subject during that time have cost a grand total of £75,600 in extra labour and lost liveweight gain, even when charging only £10 per hour for the labour. This, on a farm which was TT attested as long ago as 1938 and didn't have a single reactor between then and 2002.

And they wonder why farmers get so angry about bovine TB.

Anthony Gibson is a freelance writer and may be contacted at anthony.gbsn@googlemail.com.