These payments supported farmers who were actually farming – producing food including cereals – milk – beef – lamb- pork, and much else besides. The SFP made up the difference between the cost of production and the price we are paid at the farm gate. Whether selling direct to supermarkets or commodity brokers, with few exceptions, prices barely cover our costs.
The new Stewardship payments from a selection of well over one hundred options, without exception discourage farmers from growing crops, producing livestock or generally producing food. It is worth noting that some of the schemes we and others are looking into, purely for commercial reasons, would prevent us from growing crops on that land for up to 30 years.
Will ministers come to their senses and realise in due course, that the British farmer needs to ‘Dig for Britain’, and produce food to feed the nation rather than rely entirely upon expensive imports from countries with poor animal welfare, low quality products, including the overuse of pesticides and fertiliser?
Will farmers who decide to put their farms ‘out to grass’, have sold their expensive tractors, combine harvesters and equipment, dispersed pedigree herds and flocks, hung up their boots and diversified into ‘people farming’ (diversification) or spending winters in the Costa del Sol, be prepared to start all over again? I don’t think so.
Cecelia Pryce, Openfield’s head of Compliance, Shipping and Research recently aired her concerns about the amount of land being taken out of commercial cereal production. She asks, ‘when the call to feed the nation comes what changes could farmers make, over what timeline and at what cost, to return to commercial production.’ Some land will be covered in houses, roads, solar panels, woodland, SFI, or BNG (Biodiversity Net Gain)
The UK relies on imports of cereals to meet our domestic demand and, with crop areas shrinking due to these government incentives, weather becoming more extreme and less chemistry available to protect the crops from disease, we are as Cecilia said, ‘heading into unchartered waters.’
French farmers are renowned for their radical protests. Last week up to 40,000 thousand road signs identifying villages across rural France have been turned upside down. Amongst their grievances is their fury that foreign imports do not have to respect the strict rules imposed on them by Paris. Also, an EU obligation to leave 4 per cent of their land fallow under the Common Agricultural Policy. A ton of manure was dumped outside McDonalds and Burger King in south-eastern France because farmers felt not enough French beef was being used.
EU farmers are not happy with dik tats from Brussels and French farmers in particular, are on the war path – good for them. Watch out too for developments in Holland following Geert Wilders’s shock election victory last week.