Nature conservation on England’s farms has never been so important. While all biological measures are continuing to reflect drastic declines of almost all species, money is only available on a short term basis in a complex changing politic. Annual measures undertaken by farmers within cropped areas can only be a part of any solution. There remains the parallel challenge in rebuilding and extending primary habitats such as wild wood, wetlands and semi-natural grasslands where species richness and biomass is greatest. This becomes even more exciting if we embrace the dynamism and constancy of change within them driven by key-stone species. Such habitats take many years, even lifetimes, to create, and have no real chance of yielding an income to replace that lost in foregoing farm production. For most landowners and farmers such long term commitment is not financially viable without a clearer and much longer term subsidy system.
Scientific purity becomes lost once it has been through the European auditors and extruded further through the processes of Whitehall. Farmers are currently incentivised to manage land for wildlife through the Countryside Stewardship (CS) scheme, a worthy but complex menu of about 200 options. We are grateful for the scheme, but confounded by the static perversity of the detail. Via adherence to the regulatory tangle called Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition (GAEC), we receive the further payment of our main subsidy, the Single Farm Payment (SFP). Once land no longer supports full conventional farm production, which is often the case where farmers successfully create wildlife habitats within the CS, according to GAEC rules, it is designated as a Permanently Ineligible Feature (PIF). PIFs are not eligible for the SFP. In effect we have a scheme for paying farmers to deliver wildlife which, where best achieved, leads to actual financial penalties. Reduced farm income, higher management cost and the loss of more than half of the available subsidy on the relevant acres thoroughly blunt the ambition necessary to ignite future determination and reward successful projects.
On our own farm two inspectors found 29 acres of PIFs. One of these supported a singing nightingale while other parts of the PIFs contained areas of open water carrying hundreds of winter wildfowl, ponds teaming with quiet fun, reedbeds containing bitterns and naturally regenerating scrub woodland. Most of these habitats had taken more than 20 years to create. Young in an ecological sense. Virtually all of this PIF area contains populations of rare species that are increasing on our farm but decreasing nationally, but, nevertheless, our subsidy has been commensurately reduced. It would have been much more profitable to have had less wildlife, and zero primary habitats, whilst obeying the inflexible letter of our agreements with Natural England, who continue doing their (much appreciated) best to promote CS in the face of this absurdity enforced by their paymasters, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA).
Meanwhile we have about 10 acres of ancient woodland, carpeted in bluebells and containing a joyous rookery. Great oaks and ashes form a sylvan cathedral. It is without doubt the most irreplaceable natural asset that we own. I carefully measure its area each year to make sure it is included in neither the SFP claim nor the CS. As a typically iconoclastic farmer I find wry humour in this absurdity, but many farmers do not. They increasingly avoid the risk of being successful at that which we are politically exhorted to undertake, by not applying for CS, in order to escape probable accusations of fraud and disproportionate fines. “Catch 22” is alive and well, but wildlife loses!
Thus, in the recent “Health and Harmony” consultation in which Defra have asked farmers what they want for their industry, I have made a plea to have the best wildlife habitats supported in a simple framework that will allow for their preservation, enlargement and physical evolution in the very long term. If farmers are paid for the “production of public goods”, then the incentives must work to reward best environmental practice, and reflect pure biomass and biodiversity outcomes. I welcome Mr Goves remarks on payment for results and look forward to seeing what it means in monetary and administrative terms. Simple biology should guide us out of the current whirlpool of bureaucracy while the economic instrument should provide sufficient reward for managing assets that have no market return.
Building the new overlay of natural history across the countryside in its entirety is surely the hardest challenge facing agriculture and will require a much greater budget than is currently available. Its recreation must become a most highly valued dimension to sit alongside food production and other cultural requirements of the land. Farmers enjoy and embrace actual wildlife conservation and, I believe, will be much more co-operative when the rules are simplified and the terms made relevant to the long term nature of the commitment. In the meantime, perpetuating cultural absurdity is no longer a joke.
