Lord Barber of Tewkesbury
Farmer and conservationist who argued that efficient agriculture could still protect the countryside
LORD BARBER OF TEWKESBURY, who has died aged 99, was chairman of the Countryside Commission from 1981 to 1991; a leading countryman and conservationist, he promoted new schemes to encourage farmers to protect wildlife and landscape.
Barber was a farmer and a field sports enthusiast with an estate in the Cotswolds, and believed that good conservation was inseparable from the need to encourage farmers to remain competitive; but latterly he clashed with organic campaigners who argued that intensive farming was inimical to conservation.
Derek Coates Barber was born on June 17 1918. It was said that his second name (his mother’s maiden name) derived from an ancestor, John Coats, whose three sons, owing to a disagreement, swore in 1870 not to bear his name but instead adopted the names Coates, Cotts and Coutts.
After graduating from the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, where he won the Gold medal in practical agriculture, Barber served with the Armed Forces in the early part of the Second World War, but was invalided out in 1942.
After the war, he began farming and worked as a consultant on farming and land to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, later serving on several MAFF inquiries into agricultural education and training.
In the 1960s, he served as agricultural adviser to Gloucestershire County Council, and was for more than 20 years consultant to Humberts, chartered surveyors, for whom he wrote A History of Humberts (1980), and also chairman of the BBC’S Central Agricultural Advisory committee.
During the 1990s, he chaired Booker PLC’S countryside advisory board. His books Farming for Profits (with Keith Dexter, 1961) and Farming in Britain Today (with Frances and
JGS Donaldson, 1969) were popular texts and he became much sought-after as a speaker at farming conferences.
A keen ornithologist, he served as chairman and president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and did much to improve cooperation between the Society and farmers. Among many other appointments, he also served as president of the Gloucestershire Naturalists’ Society, of the Hawk and Owl Trust, and of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
In 1968, in an article in the RSPB’S magazine Birds, he called for greater cooperation between conservationists and farmers, and in a passage that would become a recurring theme, he observed that there were extremists on both sides – farmers who would never have the slightest interest in conservation, and conservationists whose “flat earth” attitudes might be more dangerous still to the environment.
In 1969 Barber founded the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, to provide free advice to farmers on how to manage farms in a way that encouraged wildlife. His book Farming and Wildlife: a Study in Compromise (1971) became a blueprint for ecologically sound farming practice.
After the Conservatives came to power in 1979, Barber’s background made him the obvious choice to chair the Countryside Commission, the body charged with advising the Government on all countryside matters and with a remit “to protect the natural beauty of the countryside and encourage people to enjoy that natural beauty”.
Barber worked hard, if not always successfully, to try to give effect to the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, which gave statutory protection to endangered species and sites of special scientific interest. He regretted that the Government had not provided stronger fallback powers in cases where farmers refused to honour their obligations under new “voluntary” management agreements.
Over his 10 years at the Commission, Barber launched several new initiatives, among them a campaign to restore neglected rights of way and a report recommending a new statutory body to protect the Norfolk Broads. With the Forestry Commission, he announced the planting of 12 new forests on the outskirts of major cities in England and Wales and promoted several new grant schemes to encourage farmers to use land set-aside under the Common Agricultural Policy to create wildlife habitats.
Barber, an affable, craggy-featured man with a shock of snow-white hair, was an able conciliator and won many awards for his contribution to conservation. From the late 1980s, however, as environmental and health issues assumed greater political prominence, his intellectual honesty got him into hot water.
In 1989 he won the National Award for Services to British Agriculture, sponsored by Massey Ferguson, in recognition of his work to conserve the farmed landscape. But in a speech at the awards ceremony he called for a greater understanding of the scientific basis of environmental problems: “I really do get frightened with the simplistic approach to environmental issues which you find in the public mind,” he said. People could have “a bit too much ozonery”, he suggested. The speech was greeted with predictable anger; Jonathan Porritt described Barber’s attitude as “cavalier”.
But more was to come: in 1991, prompted by a speech made by the Prince of Wales calling for the greater use of “sustainable” methods of farming, Barber, who became president of the Royal Agricultural Society of England that year, chaired a commission into the future of farming.
The Commission’s report defended the need for intensive farming and denied evidence that modern methods irreparably damaged wildlife diversity. It rejected the “image of an Arcadianstyle simple ‘green’ agriculture with a contrived non-intensive output” as “incompatible with the aim of maintaining a competitive position in the market place”.
The report suggested that the most realistic way forward might include price cuts for farm commodities as the main tool for restructuring the Common Agricultural Policy and a two-tier system under which efficient farmers were encouraged to maintain full-scale production while others were paid to leave farming or manage less productive land for the public benefit
– a prospect that had been specifically ruled out by the Prince.
The report brought a public rebuke from the Prince, a former president of the Royal Agricultural Society. Barber joked that he could “see the Tower beckoning” but claimed to be grateful to the Prince for sparking the debate.
Yet he continued to deride as “barmy” those who suggested the solution to overproduction was to “cut everything back and deliberately aim for half crops”. This, he insisted, could only result in a British agriculture that would be unable to compete.
Derek Barber, a frequent writer of letters to the Telegraph, was knighted in 1984 and made a life peer in 1992, the year after he retired as chairman of the Countryside Commission.
He was twice married. His first marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in 1983, Rosemary Pearson.
Lord Barber of Tewkesbury, born June 17 1918, died November 21 2017