Don’t take farming for granted

Paying out money to advisers in order to understand the complexity of new grant schemes is no easy task, says dairy farmer Ro Collingborn

MANY gardeners will be finding an explosion of growth in their gardens, weeds and flowers. Farmers have never known grass to grow so well and at such a rate.

We seem to have pockets of growth like now when the grass goes wild and then periods of inactivity when growth is extremely slow, as it was this spring. This makes planning even more difficult, particularly for contractors – they’re currently needed to make second cut silage, cut hay and to start harvest all at the same time. This is even trickier in a time when labour is short, and sunshine not to be taken for granted.

However, we are the end of an amazingly sunny week – in UK terms a heatwave! Though we are promised rain at the end of it.

Not so Canada, overwhelmed with temperatures reaching 49.6C in Lytton. Days later the entire village burnt down. West Coast North America is experiencing an extreme heatwave with a high of 54.5 degrees, probably the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth. Climate change made this heatwave 150 times more likely. It’s predicted that three billion people will soon be living in areas too hot for human life.

It’s no coincidence that Canada, Australia and the US have high carbon emissions. British Columbia relies on hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel revenues, mainly coal and gas and emissions which are still going up. Australia is heavily dependent on coal, with no plans to change. Ironically these are the countries that Boris is using for his “ground-breaking” trade deals.

Basically all three have stuck with fossil fuels to ignite their economies, and are still ignoring the consequences. They need to connect the dots. Alarmingly, parts of the Amazon Rainforest, particularly in the south east, are now becoming carbon emitters, rather than the carbon sink we have all relied on.

Northern Europe is experiencing the opposite – extreme flooding. Under these varied conditions, how are farm animals and crops surviving and what is the impact on the world’s food supply? Changes in temperature and increased world trade mean that disease is more likely to spread and have a devastating impact. Covid is an example in humans, but there are many exotic diseases knocking at our borders to affect animals and crops.

What of the security of our food supply? Under the EU, farmers weren’t making much money, but there was an element of security in the Basic Premium payment. There were problems with this; prices went up to the consumer, prices to the farmer didn’t (in 2007 we were getting 27.5 p a litre for our milk, and we get the same price now in 2021). We were promised that the new system “payment for public goods “would make up the difference and farmers could be better off.

Many farmers have already started on this journey using Countryside Stewardship. There is a deadline of July 30, so advisers all over the land are very busy. To further complicate matters, Defra has just introduced a Sustainable Farming Incentive Pilot with a September deadline. This currently has eight standards. These standards have three levels of payment – introductory, intermediate and advanced – and are very complicated in themselves.

Many farmers have been wondering if they can take part in both schemes at the same time, and the answer is yes, but only if there is no overlapping. For instance, we would actually meet the advanced standard for our hedges, but there has to be a grass buffer each side of the hedge, which would then mean we couldn’t put a CSS option in the field on the other side. There are grassland options in the SFI pilot, but the introductory payment is very low, and the other two standards extremely complex. Just reading them gave me a headache! Are you following?

The payments for CSS are too low now, having been put in place over six years ago. On the capital side, the grants are very useful but fencing, concrete and steel have seen a massive

cost increase this year, and the capital rates should be adjusted to take account of this.

The farm budget may not have changed overall, (in spite of the promises) but farmers are increasingly having to pay out money to advisers to understand the complexity of these new schemes. Next year, vets will be paid to make health plans, not the farmer. If you don’t use an adviser, things may go wrong through no intentional fault of your own and you will then no doubt be treated with a marked lack of compassion.

The real headache for farmers is

not that they currently receive £93 an acre on all their land, but the payment rates on Countryside Stewardship and the Sustainable Farming Initiative are much, much lower and the obligations quite onerous. Unless ELMS is much more generous, there’s no way that farmers aren’t going to be considerably worse off, which I didn’t think was originally intended. Farmers may also be put off by the complexity of the new schemes, as well as the low rewards, and decide that the financial reward is not worth all the hassle.

And then, what happens to our food supply, if global warming and disease puts paid to all those imports?

It surely makes most sense to eat local food as long as the farmer is still there to produce it. Please, Government, look after your family farms before it’s too late.

Ro Collingborn has been dairy chairman of the Women’s Food and Farming Union, on the Milk Development Council, the Veterinary Products Committee, the RSPCA Council and is currently a Wiltshire Wildlife Trust Director

Paul Silvers/SWNS Farmers have never known grass to grow so well and at such a rate, says Ro