Brexit clouds horizon for hill farmers
HILL FARMING is of colossal importance to the United Kingdom – it brings the public benefits of biodiversity and flood prevention, and economic benefits.
In my constituency we have the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales National Parks and South Lakeland.
The Lake District became a world heritage site just 12 months ago. The tourism economy of Cumbria is worth £3bn a year and 60,000 jobs, all underpinned by the work of our farmers to protect and maintain that landscape.
Why are most of our hill farmers involved in hill farming? It is about food production. Some 45 per cent of UK lamb is produced in the uplands; 55 per cent of the UK suckler herd is located in the uplands and 35 per cent of UK milk is produced in the uplands.
Of course, straw and feed grown in the lowlands goes to feed animals in the uplands, so without hill farming, lowland farming would soon go. That should concern and bother us all.
Rightly, we are often concerned about fuel security, but we think too little about food security. Some 45 per cent of the food we consume today is imported. Twenty years ago, that figure was more like 35 per cent. It is a very worrying trend.
The future for hill farming is vital. Providing a future for our uplands must be at the heart of the Government’s plan in the Agriculture Bill that we look forward to in a few weeks’ time.
The ring-fencing and protecting of the Common Agricultural Policy budget post-Brexit of £3.8bn until 2022 is important. I have heard some Government members talk about that as a long-term commitment, but anyone who thinks four years in farming is long-term understands nothing about farming. It does need to be a longterm commitment, and there needs to be a growing, not fixed budget. The Government must take immediate action on existing payments.
Many hill farmers are coming to the end of their high-level stewardship and entry-level stewardship agreements. A friend of mine, a farmer in the Westmorland part of the Yorkshire Dales, comes to the end of his HLS agreement in January 2019.
He is not allowed to start an application or have a start date for a countryside stewardship scheme until January 2020, so he has to live for 12 months without a scheme of that kind. Even then, mid-tier countryside stewardship schemes offer little value, and higher-tier schemes are frankly unfathomable and incredibly difficult to get through.
Many farmers simply do not bother with them. Will Ministers ensure the continuation for hill farmers of HLS and ELS agreements until a new, better and bespoke scheme for the uplands can be introduced? I also suggest that the new scheme has monthly start dates, to ease the workload for the RPA and Natural England.
It looks like the one thing we are sure of in the Agriculture Bill is that basic payments will not be part of it.
Over the last 40-odd years, we have subsidised food in this country and we have never had a debate about whether we thought that was a good idea. But we can be certain that we will feel it when we stop subsidising food.
We can welcome public goods being funded, but we should all take a step back and consider what that might mean for the upland farmer.
If we over-commodify every single thing that they do, will we not be in a situation where we see the price of everything and the value of nothing?
I do not really have time to express my concern for the future of young people in hill farming; about how to create incentive schemes to get them in and to allow older farmers to retire with dignity to an affordable home, given the astonishing price of housing in rural areas such as mine.
Every £1 invested in farming produces a £7 return. British farming begins in the hills. It has a future only if the uplands have a future.
Over the last 40-odd years we have subsidised food in this country and never had a debate about it.