The environment seems likely to benefit from our leaving the EU, if the government carries through the plans that they have announced for the post-Brexit future of farming and the environment. I am not sure that the proposals have been widely publicised by the press, and for many of us both the complexity we have learned to expect of farming policy and a certain cynicism may have discouraged us from taking the time to absorb the information available. But if – and that is quite an if – they do what they say they are going to do, the environment should benefit very significantly. I have tried to understand what is planned, and I hope my conclusions are both true and helpful.
The way the EU Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) subsidised farmers and landowners in the UK was quite outrageously unfair and highly exploitative of the taxpayer. Farmers and landowners were (and still are) paid according to how much land they owned. It didn’t start off like that, but when previous EU farm subsidies based on production created wheat mountains and butter mountains and catastrophic overstocking of upland pastures, the solution arrived at to end the food mountains was the Direct Payments system, under which farmers and landowners were paid by the hectare. Not for doing anything much except keeping land in a ‘farmable’ condition, which as George Monbiot has pointed out encouraged landowners not to allow any tree regeneration in the uplands, supposing the sheep and deer weren’t already preventing it. I’ve no idea how this policy played out in France or Italy; maybe it made sense there, but in the UK it was grotesquely unprogressive. Under this scheme a small farmer in Wales with no access to hill grazing, for example, and earning a very poor farm income, would get minimal support, while in one specimen year the Duke of Devonshire got £390,000, the Duke of Buccleuch £405,000, the Earl of Plymouth £560,000, the Earl of Moray £770,000, the Duke of Westminster £820,000 and the Vestey family £1.2m, according to an article by George Monbiot, dated 2011, which I just dug up. The payment rates have not gone down in the interval, you can be sure, and this level of payment to very wealthy landowners in the UK (such as the Sultan of Brunei) has been well publicised. At the same time as this was going on farming was destroying our wildlife on a scale unprecedented since the last Ice Age started. I often resist mentioning all the creatures that have almost vanished in my lifetime – a list which seems to include pretty well all our birds except blackbirds, crows, rooks, magpies and woodpigeons, to judge by the birds I see on my almost daily walks in Herefordshire nature reserves – and I try to find grounds for optimism. And the proposals for post-Brexit farming, if they are to be believed, do seem to give some grounds for hope. There seems to have been a recognition that the British public wants environmental ‘goods’ to be provided by farmers if they are to be paid out of our taxes. Although the landed classes might well have hoped a Tory government would continue to finance their gravy train, after Brexit their Direct Payments can be clearly seen to be being for paid by the British taxpayer rather than by a distanced Europe, and more easily understood as the transfer of funds on a quite extraordinary scale from the ordinary taxpayer to our wealthiest landowners.
George Eustace, the environment, food and rural affairs minister, announced the Agricultural Transition Plan for 2021-2024 back in November. The farmers’ and landowners’ Direct Payments benefits should be halved by 2024 and will be phased out by 2027. This is expected to make up to £1bn available to pay farmers to improve the environment by carbon capture and by using environmentally friendly farming methods. The details of these changes, contained in the Environmental Land Management Plan (ELM) are expected be piloted starting this year.
The ELM, as well as outlining the government’s aim to pay public money for public goods such as thriving wildlife and cleaner air and water, is also tightly linked to government climate change policy and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The ELM is baked in to the 25 Year Environment Plan, which encourages me to think that international pressures to halt climate change will make it more likely that the government will follow through on these plans.
The ELM has three main strands:
Landscape Recovery will feature long-term projects to change land use, including rewilding, tree planting and peatland restoration. It should end the destructive burning of grouse moors, though there may be battles against the aristocracy to win here, and it ought to result in our deforested, sheep-gnawed semi-derelict uplands recovering some ecological value.
Local Nature Recovery will support local nature recovery and local environmental priorities, encouraging collaboration between farmers, land managers, conservation organisations and local communities. There is the potential for projects in my local area, such as Stump Up for Trees, the Wye and Usk Foundation, River Action and the Wildlife Trust, to cooperate with farmers where they may previously have been in conflict, and the same should be true throughout the country.
The Sustainable Farming Incentive will pay farmers to farm in ways that benefit the environment, improve soil health and water quality and deliver healthy hedgerows. I hope that farmers losing their Direct Payments will become miraculously enthusiastic about sustainable farming if they are to be paid to do it. Unfortunately many of them have unquestioningly accepted the post-war orthodoxy that farming cannot be done without lashings of poisonous chemicals from the likes of Bayer, and there will be a training need. But I suspect some farmers, if they can still make a living and see the wildlife of their childhoods back on the farm, will be mightily pleased. I hope so.
Nature reserves at present occupy a tiny percentage of the land area of the UK, and it has become clear to me that they are sadly inadequate. They may contain reserves of rare species, but, for example, in a landscape where insects are being eradicated by insecticides you will not find spotted flycatchers or bats thriving in nature reserves, because the decline in insects is landscape wide. The need to change the whole landscape so that it is not any longer essentially hostile to life is urgent because the small local nature reserves were never more than a holding strategy. There are features of the Environmental Land Management plans which offer hope, in particular the aims of encouraging collaboration between farmers, land managers, communities and conservation organisations. For people like me, despairing of the inadequacy of nature reserves and horrified by the devastation caused by modern chemical farming, there is suddenly some hope, and maybe in the countryside the possibility of a healing of antagonisms by an involvement in a cooperation between environmentalists and farmers. For those of us powerless to do much more than feed half a dozen species of garden birds each winter, sow a few wild flowers and maybe to become a member of a local wildlife trust, there is now hope of more fundamental landscape-scale change in which we can become actively involved. There is hope that the farmers who have been the agents of the breakdown of our countryside may suddenly become the agents of environmental recovery.
Is this all too good to be true? Can we believe that our government and future governments will carry out these plans? I like to think that at the very least they have conceded that this sort of change is credible, necessary and possible, and that the chemical farming orthodoxy undermines the future of the planet, and that they need to demonstrate credible plans to start to combat climate change. At the very least they have shared a vision to which we should all hold them.