Future of British countryside at risk

IT has taken Defra over 30 years to fine tune the BPS Agricultural Payments with a history of delayed payments, mapping mistakes and general incompetence but now, when the scheme has been finetuned and is efficient, the powers that be have chosen to ditch it and bring in ‘The Environmental Land Management Scheme’, or ELM.

As explained in a recent article, it will be a reward for farming in an environmentally sustainable way, with eight different standards to choose from.

Land agents must be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of all the extra work they will get as we lesser mortals try to unravel the complexities of soil management, soil biology, ground cover, controlled traffic management, tramlines, strip tillage, stocking density, reseeding by direct drilling and crop observations by drone to save on compaction by the agronomist’s feet.

I can see a new dimension in tomorrow’s farms, with traffic lights in the fields for traffic management, overhead electric lines to enable the trams to run on their new lines and young ladies fresh from Soho enjoying their strip tillage in Higher Eight Acres.

Historically, farmers who have abused their land by overstocking or cultivations when the soil has been too wet have learnt from their mistakes or gone out of business.

As someone who has been active in agriculture all my life, farming is not controlled by schemes it is more often controlled by the weather and the price received at the farm gate.

Last year we suffered from a very wet autumn followed by a very dry spring, resulting in reduced yields.

This year the opposite has happened and we can look forward to bumper yields of corn and an abundance of grass for cutting and grazing.

There are very simple rules to follow, when it is too wet to graze. The animals are kept in or allowed to graze on a greater area.

In arable fields the consequences of puddling in crops are no crop, or a crop not worth harvesting.

In May this year, very little field work was carried out as it was too wet to travel. A very simple common sense decision.

The future may be for satellite technology and we look forward to driverless robotic tractors and robotic milkers, but there will always be a place for good practical farming methods.

A calf will still need its colostrum. Crops will still need a good seed bed.

Minimal cultivations save costs on fuel but mean a reliance on an ever-reducing choice of chemical controls. Often it means a return to the plough as weeds become resistant.

Not only is the future of British farming very uncertain, with a government concentrating on trade deals with countries whose standards are lower than ours, but the future of the British countryside is at risk when we concentrate more time and attention to schemes rather than how we feed the nation.

Farming is not a paper exercise or its methods changed at a flick of a pen. Animal blood lines have taken years to improve. Rotations should be based on good agricultural practice, not on what payments are available.

ELM in its current form is nothing more than a paper exercise which cannot be monitored without a vast increase in Defra staff and a mountain of paperwork for an everdecreasing farming population!

Anyone who visited the excellent Devon County Show over the last three days would have seen for themselves what British agriculture has to offer illustrated by the very high quality of stock on show.

Meanwhile, while Defra make up their mind, farmers have a nation to feed.

Andrew Goodridge Devon