AS the season of goodwill descends and a page will shortly turn to welcome in the New Year, may I please ask our scientific institutions to apply their minds to solving two problems that are considerably troubling the British countryside.

Can they make it their resolutions for 2006 to:

a) Invent a vaccine that can be injected into calves thus protecting them from bovine TB and

b) Develop green polytunnels so they don't stand out quite so much in the landscape.

I have no doubt whatsoever that both these ideas will be pooh-poohed, to put it politely, by various people involved in the subjects and I will be accused of talking out of an orifice that is not my mouth.

But having written a considerable number of words about both debates in 2005, I feel the time has come when someone ought to get real here.

Firstly TB.

It is frankly beyond my comprehension that in an age when we can send a man to the moon, and retrieve him, invent the most complex communications technology and develop wonderful life-saving systems for humans, no one appears capable of coming up with an anti-TB vaccine for cattle.

There must be a serious lack of will and you must question why.

I can appreciate a proportion of these beasts are beef cattle and go for slaughter for human consumption. But then you must invent a vaccine that gets round that. Also a large proportion are dairy cattle not destined for the food chain.

The idea you can cull badgers and somehow prevent the spread of bovine TB is really a non-starter by any standards.

Certainly you can wipe them out in a restricted area and that may solve the problem of cross-infection locally, but what about everywhere else?

The elimination of the entire badger population would never be possible or acceptable. The animal is a protected species anyway, so forget it.

If there was a vaccine that could be given to young calves soon after birth, either to protect them for life or be topped up at regular intervals, it would take the emotive issue of badgers out of the equation.

I am not particularly being pro-badger because I know they can be an extreme nuisance, merely being practical. If badgers with TB were subsequently culled then it would be a badger issue to protect their kin. Badger groups could then scrap among themselves as to its worth.

So, please, cut out the badgers, go straight for the jugular and bang in a vaccine. And please, please, don't tell me it is not possible or it is "10 years away from being developed". It has been 10 years away for as long as I can remember. Discover the will.

Secondly, polytunnels.

A court case in Surrey this week sent reverberations across Worcestershire and particularly Herefordshire, because a planning inspector ruled that on a farm near Godalming, the erection of polytunnels needed planning permission.

Previously, farmers had claimed an agricultural exemption to the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act for their tunnels.

The inspector stressed there were special circumstances in the case that led him to reach his conclusion, but nevertheless, it is inevitably being taken as setting some sort of precedent.

Most of the objection to polytunnels centres around their appearance. Covering the countryside in plastic, the critics claim. But what if this plastic was less obtrusive? Say it was green and matt instead of shiny?

Ah, you might say, the system wouldn't work so well. Tender plants beneath it might get too hot or not be reached by enough light.

To that I would say, as I have in the TB debate, invent something. People wander around in cars with blacked out windows all the time. There is a method that allows light only one way and as for temperature control, have a word with the boffins who make nose panels for the moon rockets.

Farmers have every right to make the most they can from their land. Either we grow the crop here or we will have to import it from abroad. Make your mind up.

And please don't say polytunnels mean a loss of green fields. These fields could be ploughed up and turned brown quite easily.

So that is the laboratories' quest for 2006. Green polytunnels and a TB vaccine and give everyone a Happy New Year.