Green and pleasant land is no accident

After visiting a WWF presentation in Westminster, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian LiddellGrainger tells Defra Secretary Steve Barclay the charity’s arguments simply don’t stack up.

DEAR Steve Eastertide! A point in the calendar normally marked by a mass exodus to the coast and countryside – whatever the weather.

There are, indeed, large sections of the population who seem to believe that it somehow signals the start of summer and therefore clouts may be safely cast because the sun will be searingly hot and the sea will suddenly have warmed up by 20 degrees overnight.

Though when they retreat indoors or back to their vehicles suffering from exposure they will realise that nature doesn’t work like that.

I should like to think, however, that as they admire the landscapes in this part of the country (and elsewhere, for that matter) they spare a thought for those who care for them and maintain such spectacular scenery. But most, sadly, won’t.

As usual the efforts of farmers to manage and conserve the best of the

British countryside will be overlooked by the majority. They take the scenery for granted. Nature is apparently some self-sustaining force which has no need of human intervention. Farmers just fill the available spaces with crops or animals and that’s it.

Were someone to calculate – and it would be quite a task – the value of the work, largely unpaid, farmers put in to keep the place looking as good as it is I think we should all be staggered. Myself included, and as you know I have quite a background in farming. And who would do the work if not farmers?

I had a bit of a set-to last week when I went to a WWF presentation. Now, I am among those who believe WWF is doing a great job in raising the profile of the need to protect and conserve wildlife. But I don’t always agree with the detail of its policies.

Certainly not the one that was the main issue at this event, namely that farmers should be paid to “restore nature” and make a contribution to slowing climate change. The old rewilding argument, in other words.

Well at least it’s a step in the right direction. At least it is being acknowledged that even rewilded land will require hands-on management and that farmers are the obvious people to be responsible for doing that. Which is in contrast to the views of the know-nothing militants who merely demand that farmers are kicked off their properties and nature is allowed to take over. Which would soon lead to decay and dereliction and the creation of a scrubby, unmanaged wilderness which only a militant rewilder would want to visit or even find attractive.

No: my point was that farming and conservation are not mutually exclusive. You can indeed have both happening in harness. It’s already being done.

But even assuming that farmers were to be fully and generously compensated for giving up food production to become park-keepers (and given the parsimonious attitude of the Treasury that’s by no means certain) we simply cannot afford to take any more land out of the equation.

Food supplies are too fragile for such a risk to be taken. I feel pretty uncomfortable about the fact that we only produce 60 per cent of what we eat (if that) and no one in Government seems all that interested in getting the figure up – despite surveys showing that consumers want to put more British produce on their plates.

Relying on the rest of the world to keep us fed from Thursday until Sunday, which is what our current situation amounts to, is taking an enormous risk when you take into account international conflicts and the inescapable fact that climate change is having such profound effects on agriculture right around the planet.

Also, if you suddenly shove thousands of acres of Britain into conservation schemes while demand for food increases, that raises the spectre that the rest of the land will merely be worked more intensively – and thus more damagingly – to keep supplies coming.

Given the way soils in areas such as East Anglia are already so degraded and impoverished that they are within range of becoming entirely non-productive, that is not, I would argue, a place where we want to be. Yours ever

Ian

Matthew Dixon > People take our countryside for granted, never thinking that farmers are responsible for maintaining it, says Ian Liddell-Grainger