Western Daily Press (Saturday)
These small farms are backbone of industry
Prince Charles pulled no punches this week when he defended the role small farms play in sustaining the health of rural Britain. Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger was cheering him on, as he tells Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George, You will, I trust, have taken note of our future monarch’s gently couched warning this week as to the devastation we shall wreak on our countryside if we allow small and medium family farms to be erased from the landscape.
I should like to think that you have circulated a copy of what he had to say to all those mandarins who are involved in drawing up the new blueprint for the way we manage British agriculture – though somehow I doubt it.
But let me derive a small amount of satisfaction from the knowledge that Prince Charles was only saying what I and a lot of others with the future of British farmers at heart have been telling you for a very long time: that small and medium farms form the backbone of the UK industry and we must absolutely ensure that we have policies in place to ensure and encourage their existence.
You are unlikely to have heard any such opinions voiced by the NFU, over whose portals the legend “Bigger is Better” has metaphorically blazed in lurid neon tones for years because it has traditionally been run by people who have had little regard for anyone farming south of 500 acres: hence the way the views and opinions of those in the South West have been repeatedly discounted and ignored.
On the other hand, intensive farming of the kind its leaders have favoured as the only true path has a pretty shameful record, from total soil degradation in East Anglia and on the Fens to the removal from the landscape since the war of enough hedges to reach to the moon – together, of course, with the wildlife
those precious habitats supported. Intensive farming isn’t good for anything except for producing mountains of cheap food, food which has been and continues to be sold so cheaply that precious few consumers value it, the people who produce it or the wider farming community – one of the most devoted and hardworking of any economic sector.
Traditional mixed farming, on the other hand, offers much, from the virtuous circle of using natural manures rather than chemicals to the outstanding quality of grass-fed beef and lamb, to the species-rich grazing pastures, to carbon sequestration.
And then there’s the under-appreciated and often overlooked contribution to our £106 billion tourism sector, generated as a result of people being willing to travel hundreds of miles to stay in stunning countryside which looks the way it does purely because of the efforts of small and medium-sized farmers.
Most of those people wouldn’t bother to cross the road to stay on an industrial-sized farm where there is nothing to admire between you and the horizon except a succession of brightly coloured machines humming up and down.
Other countries have adopted policies to support farms in the middle
to lower tiers precisely because they realise their immense value, not simply in producing quality food, but in providing employment and indeed helping to knit together the social fabric of the countryside.
We have a unique opportunity to do the same and commit to the longterm support of an area of economic activity that delivers such diverse benefits that the term “farming” barely does it justice.
The alternative, as Prince Charles pointed out, is unthinkable.
And I really hope that you were listening.
Yours ever, Ian