The long dry period affecting much of England is having a significant impact on forage supplies. Grass that was due to be conserved as silage or hay has had to be grazed - winter feed stocks will be under pressure from the outset. Of course farmers can buy in alternative feeds but the costs impact the bottom line; less profit means less tax and that's something the Government could do without.

Governments can't control the weather but in some circumstances they can assist the farming community. One option now available (no cost to the State) is to provide a derogation allowing farmers to utilise grass within environmental schemes that normally would be unavailable. At this late stage of the year making hay or haylage would be the best bet.The window for these operations is drawing to a close.

If Defra want to be helpful, now is the time to act.

Let's suppose;

You see an elderly lady who is trying to cross a busy road; she’s struggling with her stick and a heavy shopping bag. You offer assistance. She accepts, you wave down the traffic and carrying her shopping, get her safely to the other side.

Do you:

A) wish her well and carry on with your day?

B) ask for her National Insurance number, her name and address, provide yours in reciprocity and advise her that your good deed will be notified to the Department of Work and Pensions as part of its campaign for better communities?

Clearly you will choose A), option B) is just daft. Quite apart from the fact that the lady may regard your request for information as intrusive and possibly offensive, the bureaucratic connotations of option B are burdensome and counter-productive.

So what's this got to do with farming?

Well, farming has got its very own case. It's been cooked up by almost everybody in the industry in a spectacular example of GROUP THINK. It's called The Campaign for the Farmed Environment (CFE).

The idea behind The Campaign for the Farmed Environment is to recapture the environmental benefits that were provided by set-aside. CFE suggests that this can be done by:

1. Farmers undertaking voluntary environmental work.

Of course this is always happening anyway; witness the first survey results. Activity that is now being reported as being in line with the aims of the campaign, actually commenced long before the campaign had even started! For years farmers have been encouraged to improve the biodiversity of their farms and since the early 1990’s they have been responding with real enthusiasm. Farmers simply don’t need an additional scheme with yet another glossy booklet, yet more “helpful” advice and a whole load of reporting requirements. It’s counterproductive.

2. Farmers joining, or rejoining, environmental schemes.

We are bound to ask why do we need CFE to encourage membership of the existing environmental schemes? Are the existing schemes so inadequate that they are unable to speak for themselves? And wouldn't the cost of the CFE be better saved and simply applied to making the existing environmental schemes more attractive or more widely available?

3. Farmers undertaking specific options within environmental schemes.

Unfortunately there are no options under the environmental schemes that come close to recreating the permanent habitat that set-aside was – which leads us to ask whether this is really about recapturing environmental benefits or whether it is about something else altogether?

Each year farmers in the UK are paid around £3 billion in support through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Most of the subsidy is provided through the Single Farm Payment (SFP) but a portion of the whole pot is modulated and paid to farmers who have joined environmental schemes.

It is a straightforward task for the Government to decide on the proportion of the agricultural budget that is moderated and then allocated to environmental schemes. If environmental schemes are insufficiently attractive to farmers and uptake is low, the Government can re-price the options to encourage greater participation. The total bill for agricultural / environmental support remains unchanged.

Given that a number of environmental schemes are already functioning, notably ELS and HLS, the most obvious way of maintaining the environmental benefits of set-aside would be to offer farmers simple “add on” options under these schemes that recreate or maintain the type of habitat that set-aside provided. Instead of the costly Campaign for the Farmed Environment (CFE), this is what we would do.

1. Provide a “life after set-aside” option under ELS and HLS. This option would require a similar management to the original set-aside regime.
2. Provide a “hay meadows” option where farmers would be required to cut grassland for hay. No fertiliser or pesticides could be applied. The cutting of hay quickly impoverishes soil nutrient reserves and a rich biodiversity ensues.
3. Provide a “summer forage” option for arable areas. This would follow the “overwintered stubble” option and provide a favourable habitat for birds through the summer months - one favourable habitat follows another.

These three options would all be available on a whole field basis, just as set-aside was, and ensure that the environmental benefits that grew with set-aside could be recaptured and then built upon.

Britain’s economy is in a mess



Net debt is growing at an alarming pace and for years to come government spending will have to be constrained. More importantly however, economic growth needs to be rekindled.

Agriculture is central to the rural economy, to rural communities and to the management of over 70% of the UK land area. It may only represent a small part of the national economy, but as the figures below illustrate, there is plenty to play for.



Recognising the government's critical fiscal position, here's our pre-budget submission to help get the rural economy moving again:

Protect farmland:

The UK (England in particular) is one of the most densely populated countries in the world with much of its prime agricultural land close to major conurbations. With a population likely to exceed 70,000,000 by 2030 it is essential for the food security of future generations that farmland is not lost to alternative uses. Farmland needs greater protection in the planning process with a presumption against development.

Facilitate diversification:

Agriculture is generally a commodity business that provides low returns. Farmers have sought to insulate themselves from these by diversifying into other activities and many farms are now home to other sorts of business. However, planning rules are unduly restrictive. Farmyards should therefore be re-classified for planning purposes with a presumption that encourages rural economic activity. Diversified revenue streams allow farmers to continue to invest in agriculture even when farming incomes are low.

Diffuse housing development:

There is a chronic shortage of affordable rural housing in the UK. We commend our concept of Diffuse Development. This would allow farmers to build small numbers of traditionally styled cottages in their farmyards. Through the use of planning restrictions and restrictive covenants, such properties could not be sold away from the farm and could only be occupied under longer-term lets. A simple market solution.

Free, farming!

Farms produce diverse outputs with food, energy, conservation and rural enterprise part of the mix. Farmers are best placed to decide on this mix according to their farms, their preferences and skills. But to make rational choices they need market mechanisms, not diktats. The most important requirement in this respect is a price mechanism to value conservation.

Broadly, such a mechanism is in place through ELS and HLS. However, of these schemes only ELS is widely available. Both should be. Farmers could then respond rationally choosing between farming and conservation and a market solution would be found in the allocation of land.

If there was an inadequate take-up of ELS and HLS, the pricing of conservation activities could rise to encourage greater uptake. However, since the funds are modulated from the single payment scheme this adds no cost to the Exchequer, it is merely a reallocation within the existing budget.

bTB to be?

There has been much debate over the question of whether a selective badger cull should be implemented to assist the control of bovine TB. Evidence suggests that badger culling is not particularly effective, however the evidence is derived from trials where only around 85% of the badgers in any sett were culled; the remainder became dislocated and moved off to other setts, widening the problem. If selective culling is introduced it needs to be effective and that necessitates a complete cull of any sett. The appropriate resources must be applied.

Round up:

Hundreds of millions of pounds could have been saved by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) if only it had rounded up farmer's field sizes. Without trying to answer the question of exactly what a field size is, we should ask the more important question does it matter? For the most part, in bureaucratic terms at least, it doesn't. So let's abolish micro-mapping and round our field sizes up to the nearest hectare. The complexity of the system will drain away, where a fence line is won't matter, and the massively expensive re-mapping of the British countryside will no longer be required. The deeply flawed RPA can be shrunk to suit.

Round down:

Some farmers face repeated multi agency visits all requesting similar information to ensure compliance. This is costly, unnecessary and unproductive. Inspections and compliance checks should be done on the basis of risk and sought only once.

De minimis matters!:

Does it matter that a farmer uses the manure from his two horses on his fields?

Does it matter that a farmer imports hundreds of tons of horse manure to fertilise his land?

The answers respectively are no and possibly yes but both activities have to be reported to the environment agency and recorded. De minimis remains an alien concept to bureaucrats – but it matters.

Don't penalise good environmentalists:

The UK's farmers are enthusiastic to produce biodiversity as part of their farming output. However, just as soon as they do this they are likely to be penalised. If a farmer has temporary grass in his rotation for more than five years, it becomes classified as permanent pasture and its future use restricted under EIA regulations. Similarly farmers that go out of their way to produce biodiverse habitat on their farmland can find that the EIA regulations deny its continued use as farmland! Farmers who take the trouble to encourage biodiversity should be congratulated and not have the future use of their land restricted.

Make hay:

We bemoan the loss of traditional meadows yet agricultural policy prevents their re-establishment. A simple solution exists. Allow farmers to cut hay on land in set-aside or under management as “field corners” in environmental schemes. There is one principal condition - no fertiliser. Within a few years the removal of hay will impoverish the nutritional status of the soil and a biodiverse flora will return.

Look for the woods:

Defra and Natural England need to think big about conservation. Far too many useful options under environmental schemes are restricted to small areas where their benefits are limited. This is particularly so for land that was previously set aside. Further, many options that could make a profound difference to our countryside in years to come are inadequately rewarded such that their adoption is unlikely. Our strategy for the renewal of hedgerow trees has been taken on board but with a payment of just £1 per tree it won't get far.

KISS and move on:

Despite the penchant for government organisations to talk business school language, the most important acronym has escaped their attention – “keep it simple stupid”. The less time farmers spend dealing with the State, the more time they can allocate to being productive thereby helping Britain's economy to get back on track.