Sterling work on prompt delivery of farm payments

Another Winter Fair has been and gone – and what a success it was once again. We enjoyed catching up with you all and discussing many #FarmingMatters, such as quarantine units, livestock-worrying and Brexit over the two-day event.

Despite the damp start, many of our members will have been in good spirits as the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs Lesley Griffiths announced that over 91% of Basic Payments will be made on the first day of the payment window (December 1), meaning that more than £201m will be paid into the bank accounts of 14,111 Welsh farm businesses.

We cannot underestimate the hard work that both FUW and Welsh Government staff do to ensure such high SAF form validation rates year on year, and we are grateful for all their hard work in the past year which has achieved this.

For the 9% of farms who will experience delays in receiving their payments, the high rate of payment to others will come as little consolation, but we hope the majority of these will be processed over the coming weeks, and we will continue to highlight the need to improve on what is – to the Welsh Government’s credit – already and consistently the highest rate in Great Britain.

A key reason the prompt delivery of such monies is important is that vast sums of the money arriving in the farm account through the BPS will go straight out to secondary and tertiary businesses which are dependent on it, while the rest will go out to other businesses as the year goes on.

And we know that thousands of businesses are reliant on Welsh agriculture – you just had to look at all the traders and businesses exhibiting at the Fair.

Further good news came when the Welsh Government launched an interactive Predictive Agricultural Land Classification (ALC) map at the Winter Fair.

The release of this new ALC map marks a major step forward, an initiative which we understand is a first in the UK.

This new map makes it possible to see why land is graded in a certain way, while identifying both the positive and negative attributes of the land.

However, as with all data, there will be some glitches and inaccuracies due to lower-resolution datasets, but this marks a step-change compared with what has been available to date.

This type of data is just a part in the jigsaw of information that becomes increasingly important as Brexit approaches – information which is essential if decisions, be they at the business or political level, are to be evidence-based.

As argued by the FUW for many years, while the development of well-meaning visions expressed in words are important, these must be backed up by hard evidence and data, and properly scrutinised in order to ensure they are not fatally flawed.

Thankfully, we are now beginning to see the release of large volumes of such information for close scrutiny – although apparently not to the Brexit select committee, which has expressed its concerns at the redaction of information relating to studies of the impact of Brexit on 58 industrial sectors.