Collaboration key to the challenges facing farming
Designing and implementing the new Sustainable Farming Scheme in Wales (SFS) is a generational opportunity to reset the role and direction of Welsh farming on a new sustainable and regenerative pathway, says expert Terry Marsden
THE current proposals regarding the set of universal actions need wholesale reconsideration given the rising national concerns around food security, resilience of domestic supply, farm business continuity and meeting demanding net-zero and bio-diversity restoration goals.
These goals and challenges need to be addressed in a bold, visionary, integrated and efficient manner, through encouraging strong collaboration and partnership between farmers, other food supply chain actors, government and the wider food and environmental policy community.
This requires new vision and leadership, building a new consensus and contract between farmers and the wider public as consumers.
The current proposals lack an overall vision, have ignored the decade long debate in Wales about creating a wider sustainable food strategy for Wales, and risk fragmenting the goals into a series of narrow land-based environmental objectives which will be bureaucratically monitored and unevenly applied.
They are still based upon the rather spurious binary which classifies only strictly environmental land management as “public-goods” (and thus worthy of public funding support), and sustainable food production as a private and marketised good (to be determined by a highly rigged and retailer-dominated food “market”).
This lies at the heart of farmers,’ as well as consumers,’ concerns about food, how it is produced and what eventually gets purchased and digested by consumers.
The SFS vision must be to incentivise urgently farmers and land managers to convert to agro-ecological and regenerative farm and land use production practices as the optimum way of maintaining their farm businesses and productive capabilities. This is not now as radical as it might have sounded back when the UK voted to leave the EU and the CAP.
Many farmers, having faced significant increases in their external input costs, and changes to their export markets have begun to adopt more “circular-farming” and mixed farming and rotational practices again; exiting the relentless conventional “race to the bottom” cost-price squeezes which threaten their viability and existence.
Combined with this there has never been a time when the need to address food insecurity, both expressed in the provision of quality foods, and in their allocation and diet entitlements to consumers, has been greater.
The key goal then of the SFS must be to integrate incentives for farmers and land managers to produce sustainable foods with natures so as to meet these societal needs.
Six key actions emerge which should lie at the centre of the scheme:
develop whole-farm business plans with farmers and land managers based upon face-to-face advisory/business support and embracing a farming systems approach which centres on regenerative farming practices;
base and taper payments according to the achievements in the wholefarm plans over a seven-year planning period and relate payments to the costs of labour needed for making the changes (e.g. introducing horticulture, creating more mixed rotational and grazing systems, creating renewable energy and clean water facilities, reducing carbon and methane emissions);
support the creation of clusters of farmer-to-farmer networks building shared communities of practice in regenerative farming innovations;
create a farm and food skills academy programme administered through the network of agricultural colleges and universities;
create local authority demonstration farms and events which could act as nodes/hubs for the exchange of innovation in food and farming systems approaches; and
link farmers to public and private procurement and marketing channels for the sale and exchange of high quality regional Welsh foods as part of a wider national food strategy and the further development of local authority food partnerships.
Many of the proposed land-based universal actions could then be incorporated into the wholefarm planning approach which could be administered through Farming Connect.
This would focus upon payments for achieving changes in farming production practices and ties this directly to sustainable land management.
Many of these processes build upon current activities of the Nature Friendly Farming Network and the former partnership and advisory support provided under former Tir Gorfal
and Tir Cymen schemes.
The key problem with our food supply lies in the ways in which food has been produced.
It follows that to restore and regenerate our farming countryside it will be necessary to support changes in these production practices in harness with their ambient natures and landscapes.