If farmers are embracing Brexit, why can’t others?
Moving to the country five years ago was the wisest decision I ever made – marriage and children aside, obviously. Nothing makes me happier than tramping across the broad, sloping fields of northern Hampshire. When we hear an engine in the distance, it means someone is on the way to our little farmhouse. Otherwise, we hear only the racket of birdsong or, in August, the drone of the bees in the lavender.
These benefits are provided provided for for us, us, as it were, by local farmers. farmers. When When I I gaze at the chalk downs, downs, I I am am admiring admiring the handiwork of generations generations of of cultivators. When II listen listen to to a a yellowhammer, I am profiting profiting from from the the work of gamekeepers who, who, in in making making their estates safe for for pheasants, pheasants, have have incidentally created a a paradise paradise for for other other birds, birds,andso,so,bybyextension,extension,forforme.me.
Their work carries a cost. Landowners are not allowed to do as they please with their property. Planning restrictions forbid them to turn their fields into housing estates, because we treat those fields as, in some senses, a shared patrimony. England is unusual in that its loveliest places are tilled. Our national parks protect farmland, from Exmoor to the Peak District. Contrast that with, say, the United States, where national parks are wild places – Yellowstone or Yosemite – while farmland means vast agri-businesses.
It seems only fair that the state should compensate farmers for the environmental stewardship it demands on behalf of the rest of us, but subsidising food production is a spectacularly blunt way to offer compensation. Hence Michael Gove’s welcome decision to ditch the Common Agricultural Policy, where payments go to inefficient and environmentally insensitive farmers, and tie grants instead to ecologically valuable work, such as encouraging biodiversity, halting soil erosion and preventing river pollution. Unsurprisingly, his ideas have been warmly greeted by organisations such as the RSPB and the National Trust. More significantly, they are going down well with landowners.
Though the NFU’s Europhile bigwigs struggle to applaud any move away from the CAP, most farmers, at least in my part of the world, are upbeat. They know that EU rules discourage modernisation and keep out new entrants. They know, too, that British farmers are the keenest adopters of new technology. They always have been. The countryside around me might seem settled but, in truth, it is a whirlpool of innovation. Until half a century ago, for example, this was sheep country: it was the introduction of modern combine harvesters and fertilisers that made its owners see its potential as arable land.
Britain, unlike most EU states, is a big net food importer, whose agricultural sector accounts for only one per cent of the economy. At the same At the time, same our time, hedgerows our hedgerows and cops es create and copses the loveliest create the landscapes finest landscape sin Europe. in Europe. Now, Now, at last, at last, we we can can design design a system a system that that recognises recognises those those twin twin truths – a British farming policy for British farmers.
If only every government department were equally ready to grasp the opportunities of Brexit.