Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Will it pay to go green or to keep on growing?
Environmental measures are welcome but will they hit food production in the process, asks
EVERY year we talk about going to the Oxford Farming Conference – we generally remember when it’s halfway through. It’s something that always sounds too grand and expensive for us mere farmers, but maybe next year, we can give it a go (if we remember).
The major announcement at the conference was Steve Barclay’s speech outlining the Agricultural Transition Plan Update. I have been grumbling about the lack of money in grants and lack of focus, but to give credit where credit’s due, we could be getting somewhere! As I’ve said before – if the basic premium had been kept up until all the grants had been worked out, farmers would have had more confidence and been less confused.
However, grants for bespoke environmental payments like “species rich grass” are going to be increased from £160 per hectare to £646 per hectare, which is obviously extremely attractive. As most hay meadows were destroyed during and after the last war, payments could be very welcome for those still remaining. It could be a big boost in income for the wildlife trusts. There will also be attractive grants to restore these meadows. Most existing payments will also get a 10% uplift, with 50 more items being added in due course.
It looks as if there will be payments for farmers who have land that floods regularly, but as with many of the new offerings, details are to come later in the year. I am hoping that these payments might apply to us. We certainly get flooded a lot nowadays.
There is a general election coming up, but I’m sure that has nothing to do with the overall improvement in payments. We have to hope that a new political regime won’t stop the new grants that have been announced, only add to them.
Flooded land and wild flowers don’t tie in with high food production. I think the Government’s current thinking is to intensify production using new technology, as well as offering environmental payments to smaller farmers. As a smaller dairy farmer, we need all our land for grazing, if we are to continue to produce milk. Even now, in January we have been out with the plate metre measuring the grass. All I know is that the grass has been growing very well in the garden in recent weeks.
It looks as if it’s far more financially rewarding to plant crops for bird seed, rather than food, and it’s a much easier option. On the dairy side, we could have a very easy time looking at lakes and reservoirs and planting lots of herbal leys, without the need to keep any cows that need milking twice a day, combatting labour shortages and the need for constant investment. Cows are hard work; lakes and wild flowers are not.
As a country, I think we’ve been behind with going green and combating climate change, so in many ways I welcome the change in emphasis. However, if our production is curtailed in the process, it’s likely we will see more empty spaces on supermarket shelves, together with the importation of even more food from countries that are cutting down their forests to supply us.
For many weeks recently, eggs, an essential breakfast ingredient, were one of the supermarket categories that had empty shelves. I always find cooking breakfasts challenging. My own breakfast of microwave porridge, with a cut-up orange and our own delicious Brinkworth Dairy yoghurt, is relatively easy, so I stick to that.
Nowadays my husband gets to the kitchen first, and manages to use quite a lot of saucepans in an attempt to have a healthy breakfast, generally involving some form of eggs. (I count the saucepans when I have to wash them up!)
I can remember the days of Edwina Curry, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health. She was horrified by salmonella present in the UK’s laying flocks and told us that we should only eat two eggs a week. In December 1988 she claimed: “Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella.”
This came over as eggs are bad for you, rather than we need to do something about salmonella. At the time, 400 million eggs were destroyed and four million hens. “Eggwina” as she came to be called, was forced to resign a fortnight later, while the Government faced huge claims for compensation. If she was trying to make her name, it spectacularly backfired.
She should have said that many laying hens were infected with salmonella, not the eggs. It led to very healthy eggs with laying hens having to have many vaccinations to combat disease. Chickens have very delicate legs and these injections cause abscesses, so not so welfare friendly. In 1998, the Lion Standard was introduced for hens vaccinated against salmonella. It took over 25 years for egg production to recover to 1988 levels.
It looks as if it’s far more financially rewarding to plant crops for bird seed, rather than food, and it’s a much easier option