Brexit, food choice and control all discussed at conference
Uncertainty over Brexit, changing food preferences and the need for farmers to take control were among the issues to dominate the Three Counties Farming Conference at Malvern. Sue Bradley reports
PRESIDENT of the National Farmers’ Union Minette Batters was joined by Neil Parish, the Honiton and Tiverton MP and chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, and the Soil Association’s head of farming Liz Bowles to talk about how the agricultural industry might look after March 29, 2019.
Countryfile presenter Adam Henson chaired the discussion before an audience of 400 farmers.
“What farmers really need to take away from tonight is they’ve got to be really business minded,” he said.
They need to be on top of their game and they need to re-think their businesses if they are to survive in the great unknown of Brexit.”
During the debate Ms Batters called on Mr Parish to “corral” support for British agriculture.
“This country has never felt more politically homeless,” she said. “We were promised less regulation and more money so you can see why farmers thought Brexit was hugely appealing.
“But everyone who drove that agenda is now off and at the moment I can see us crashing out.” NATIONAL Farmers’ Union president Minette Batters wants environment secretary Michael Gove to produce a ‘food strategy’ showing where the country wants to go and how it will get there.
She also called for farmers to be in the ‘driving seat’ over the environment, describing how many within the agricultural industry were increasingly fed up with the degree of criticism levelled at their activities, with soil degradation and livestock methane emissions the latest subjects for attacks.
“I speak to so many farmers at the moment who feel massively frustrated at being used as a football,” she said, later asking “when is farmer bashing going to stop?”
Ms Batters said the NFU was backing Theresa May’s Brexit plan, describing a ‘no deal’ situation as ‘catastrophic’ for British farming and ‘nothing short of Armageddon’, with no access to EU markets, lower or obliterated tariff walls for imported foods and tariffs on chemicals, fertilisers and vaccines coming in from Europe among the consequences.
She said representations made to the prime minister this summer had resulted in food and farming being reinstated within trade negotiations, along with a new global seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme that would allow for 2,500 people to come to the UK to work. But she said it often felt that policy was being made ‘on the hoof ’.
“We feel it’s essential we get into transition,” said Ms Batters, a tenant farmer from Wiltshire.
“This is about the withdrawal agreement. There is very little on the table regarding a future relationship.”
Going forward, Ms Batters welcomed the ‘warm words’ of Dr Liam Fox that there would be no imports of food produced to lower standards than those expected in the UK.
“Michael Gove threatened to lie in front of a bus were this to happen,” said Ms Batters.
“We said the only way of achieving this (maintaining standards) is to legislate it. It’s absolutely paramount that we achieve this; that we don’t have our farmers undermined in the market place by food produced to lower standards.”
Ms Batters said the NFU was planning ahead with its report, ‘United by our Environment, Our Food, Our Future’, due to be launched at a conference in London in December.
“It isn’t all singing and dancing,” she said. “There’s a clear recognition of what we can do better; where we can have policy that works around the UK and not in 27 individual EU countries.
“Farming is critically important: 72 per cent of landscape today is farmed landscape, but we have to realise that farming doesn’t always resonate with everybody. We have to look at it through the lens of the environment and the lens of food.”
The NFU has identified four particular areas on which to focus: integrity and standards, Britain’s moral imperative, health and nutrition and the relationship between agriculture and nature.
Ms Batters said the risk of food fraud and adulteration was more than it had ever been, although it was important to look back at the situation 20 years ago when consumers were living in the aftermath of BSE and Foot and Mouth to see how far the industry had come.
She said the UK had a moral imperative to produce food, especially with its favourable climatic conditions and because of the global threat from unsustainable farming practices.
Farmers had shied away from getting involved with nutrition, she
‘We have to realise that farming doesn’t always resonate with everybody’ MINETTE BATTERS
said, adding it was important they played a role in finding a solution to how the foods they produced could be part of a healthy balanced diet. Meanwhile she predicted that new technologies and innovation would help drive a green Brexit.
“We look at our food production footprint and it’s astonishingly good but it can be better,” she said. THE Tiverton and Honiton MP, who farmed near Burnham on Sea for several years and currently chairs the environment, food and rural affairs select committee, said the new agricultural bill takes the farming world and “turns it upside down” with its emphasis on payments for ‘greening’.
And while he described the document as ‘an enabling bill’ containing a lot of ‘good things’, Mr Parish said Michael Gove’s response to comments over the scant mention of farming in its initial pages was that ‘Hamlet doesn’t appear very quickly in the play’.
The Devon MP went on to say, “Don’t shoot the messenger, but we can try and deflect the tide but what we won’t do is actually change the direction of the tide, and the direction of the tide is towards the environment. It will be about soil management, and holding that carbon in the soil, hedge planting and more trees perhaps, looking at the catchment areas of flooding. All these things will be very much enshrined in the new support system.”
Mr Parish said it was important that the ‘Westminster Bubble’ realised that much of the English countryside owed its beauty to being a managed landscape, with sheep and cattle playing an important role.
“With climate change we understand that while sheep and cattle may give off methane gas, at the same time they’re taking a very low grade protein and converting it into high quality protein,” he said.
“Grass-fed beef and lamb is valuable not only for eating but to the landscape: access to the countryside you won’t get unless you manage it properly.”
While he doesn’t think food security will feature in the Agricultural Bill, Mr Parish is calling for it to include a level of production that the country must not drop below.
“The environment is good but I think we can mix the environment with food production. If we export our food production we’re importing somebody else’s water and climate,” he said.
Mr Parish said he was optimistic over the UK achieving a trade deal with the EU.
“Whether it’s this bill I do not know,” said the MP, who previously served as a member of the European Parliament for 10 years. “I don’t want to see us crash out with no deal.
“Don’t worry if it’s late in the day. It’s always late in the day. We have to get this to work.
“We produce good quality, traceable food. It’s sustainable, good to eat and safe to eat food. That’s what our consumers want. It’s up to politicians to get a deal.”
Liz Bowles – head of farming at the Soil Association
ORGANIC food production is a real opportunity, with the market in its sixth year or growth and increasing by six to seven per cent a year, said the Soil Association’s head of farming Liz Bowles.
She described the trend as possibly a sign of things to come, with consumers wanting “food integrity and food they can trust”.
And she called on farmers to respond to the ways in which diets were changing.
“There is no doubt that people are choosing to eat different foods than they were 50 years ago,” she said.
Ms Bowles said farmers needed to think seriously about the impact their activities had on the environment and that responding to the challenges of climate change would be a priority for farmers.
“I don’t subscribe to the view that we have to produce ever more food to feed a growing world population,” she said.
“We waste 20% of the food we produce and most of us in the Western world eat diets that contain far too many calories.”
A recent conference discussing the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee heard about interesting research modelling the impact on farming, the environment and food production if the whole of the EU were to transition to more agri-ecological farming practices, such as fewer synthetic ingredients and different structures for livestock and cropping.
“The criticism levelled at organic farming is you can never feed the world, but this group of researchers are showing this isn’t the case,” she said.
“We can still feed ourselves in Europe perfectly adequately and export food as much as we do now. Crucially there would be a reduction of greenhouse gases in the order of 42%.”
She called on politicians to give more credit to farmers for biorenewable energy enterprises and to recognise the role they played in the sequestering of carbon in agricultural and horticultural land through long crop rotations, infrequent soil turning and managing land as permanent grassland.
In time it will become unacceptable for the diets of farm animals to be predominantly cereal-based, pre- dicted Ms Bowles, who added that eating habits were set to move to more red meat produced from pasture-grazed animals and away from pork and poultry.
“Pigs and chickens don’t emit methane but their reliance on cereals relies on a significant amount of nitrous oxide emission on land used to grow the cereals,” she explained.
“We need to look at utilising all our land to best effect, and where we have grassland that really cannot be ploughed, grazing livestock is the best way to utilise that land.”
Agroforestry would also become increasingly important, said Ms Bowles, who earlier described how the organic practice of using crimson clover as a cover crop was now mainstream.
“We need to find ways of managing to produce food in agri ecological ways that don’t cause the problems that we’re seeing in our agricultural lands today,” she stated.
“Agroforestry is a clear way of getting the benefits of carbon sequestration whilst also using the land in between for grassland production and cereal production.”
Whereas once the emphasis for agriculture was on maximising yield, now it’s about agriculture and productivity in the round, said Ms Bowles.
‘I don’t subscribe to the
view that we have to produce ever more food to feed a growing world population’
LIZ BOWLES