Somerset-based organic dairy business Yeo Valley has assured that it will not support badger culling on its farms. The apparent opposition came after questions were asked of the organic giant on Twitter.

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The family-run enterprise, which mostly produces yoghurts, is the largest organics business in the UK. Yeo Valley's base, near Bridgwater, is situated relatively close to one of the government's proposed trial cull zones in Somerset, where badgers will be killed later this year in a bid to tackle bovine TB.

The strategy has been challenged on its efficacy and humaneness, and although it has the staunch backing of the farming industry and Defra, many eminent scientists, including those who led the previous government's culling trials, remain opposed to the policy.

When questioned online earlier today, a Yeo Valley spokesperson responded "Yeo Valley does not and will not cull badgers on our organic farms."

However, despite its initial strongly worded assertions, Yeo Valley said the businesses wished to remain neutral over the issue of culling. A Yeo Valley spokesperson told Farming Online that the company "neither supports nor is against government policy."  

Sainsbury's, Waitrose and the Cooperative have said they will not source milk from cull zones, but have also adopted non-committal positions on the government's policy of culling badgers. Yeo Valley would not comment on whether it would source milk from the cull zones in Somerset and Gloucestershire.

Last month, a Durham University Professor became the latest respected scientific expert to claim that culling would not effectively address the problem of bovine TB. Professor Peter Atkins went further to state that, in some cases, culling could potentially make the issue worse. He continued, "Badgers almost certainly play a part in spreading the disease, but my conclusion is that their impact over the decades has been far less than suggested."

Professor Atkins explained in February, "It is very probable that other animals did and do carry TB including badgers and deer, but cattle-to-cattle transfer is likely also to be an important factor. For example, only one out of nearly 400 badgers killed in road accidents in Cheshire over two decades tested for the disease turned out to be positive.

"This goes against received wisdom that bTB would have stayed in badgers which obviously weren’t culled when the cattle were in previous decades and they then reinfected cattle stocks. But this interspecies transference seems unlikely to have occurred on the necessary scale."

Prof Atkins concluded, "Furthermore, no one has yet proved definitively which direction the infection travels between species. The Randomised Badger Culling Trial, which ran from 1998-2006 indicated complex, interwoven patterns of infection and concluded badger culling was unlikely to be effective for the future control of bTB."