APPENDIX 42
Letter to the Committee Chairman from
Mr Richard Young (F 64)
I listened with interest last night to "On
the road" on BBC Radio 4, which included interviews with
you and other members of the Agriculture Committee. I am very
pleased that your visit to Duchy Home Farm and to Eastbrook Farm
gave you a generally positive impression of organic farming.
However, the instinctive view of your colleague,
Owen Paterson, that organic farms are full of weeds and low yielding,
is not entirely unfounded. From my own experience I would say
that a small, unquantified, but not insignificant, proportion
of farms, principally some of those which converted to organic
methods prior to the introduction of the Organic Aid Scheme in
1994, do have agronomic problems associated with their switch
to organic production.
With organic premiums very high at the present
time such farms can probably live with these and remain profitable,
but I am concerned that if prices for organic produce fall, as
they could do if the volume of production increases rapidly, then
such problems will become much more significant in economic terms.
While it would be easy to condemn such farms
as outdated and inefficient and not to feel too concerned if they
fall prey to changing market conditions, some consideration of
how and why these problems have arisen may be of relevance to
your committee's investigation.
As an example, I will detail my own experiences,
as someone who converted 200 acres to organic methods in 1974
and subsequently built up to 470 acres of certified organic production
by 1985.
I began farming organically principally because
I got severe headaches when crop spraying. This may have had nothing
to do with the chemicals I was using, but it was the trigger for
a very major change of farming policy. However, during my first
ten years or so I made a considerable number of mistakes. I had
only a vague idea of what constituted a balanced crop rotation
and I did not understand clearly the widely varying approaches
I would need to prevent both perennial and annual weeds becoming
a problem on different soil types. It is relevant that some of
the mistakes I made then have proved difficult to resolve and
are still a problem for me today. A good example of this would
be the infestation of some grass fields with docks.
I should also point out that when I began there
were no premiums for organic produce and I, and virtually all
my organic farming colleagues at that time, also gave substantial
amounts of time to developing embryonic organic marketing structures
and helping to define standards. Most of us had very limited financial
resources and as a result in many cases our own farm businesses
suffered as a result.
Despite these problems I should nevertheless
stress that my livestock have been remarkably productive and free
from ill health, we have enjoyed considerable public support and
customer loyalty and I managed to survive economically using only
organic methods until early 1998, when I withdrew voluntarily
from my organic registration. The reason for this is not relevant
to the points I wish to make, but I set it out in an annex for
the avoidance of misunderstanding.
Farmers, of course, vary considerably in their
abilities and I am quite prepared to accept that many of the problems
I have encountered reflect my own inadequacies in this respect.
When I changed my farm to organic methods, however, in the early
1970's it is worth stressing that there were no recognised sources
of advice to which I could turn. As a result, I drew up no conversion
plan and had no well thought out approach to avoiding what would
now be seen as some very obvious pitfalls. Some advice for converting
producers did become available during the 1980's, but even this
was very limited and inadequate in contrast to that which is available
today.
You referred in your interview to the problems
of herbicide-resistant blackgrass, which can trouble conventional
farmers today. Perennial weed problems on an organic farm are
probably no more serious than this, nevertheless, in general it
can be stated that sound advice, planning and careful preparation
are more vital for organic farmers, especially in the very early
stages of conversion, since it is much more difficult and costly
to correct mistakes later on.
While the focus of the Organic Aid Scheme (OAS)
and the Organic Farming Scheme (OFS) is exclusively on new entrants,
I feel it is necessary to put in a word for the problems facing
some pre-1993 organic producers, who I believe require help, if
they are to remain in organic production for the foreseeable future.
I cannot tell you how many farms fall into this category. I only
have first hand knowledge of a small number, but I can think off
six, off the top of my head, to which I feel these comments apply.
You will be aware that land which was in registered
organic production prior to August 1993 has been excluded from
both the OAS and the OFS and, as such, has received no assistance
whatsoever for conversion to organic methods. It is clear, however,
that each of these farms had conversion costs similar to those
incurred by converting producers today and it can be assumed that
in many cases these will have imposed a financial drain which
some carry to this day and which has also been a factor in their
poor performance. Equally important to the acreage payments I
would suggest has been the £600 lump sum for professional
advice and the requirement to produce an approved conversion plan.
While I would accept that we have gone past
the point where it would be reasonable to argue that conversion
support for these farms should be backdated, I feel it is just
worth mentioning that when John Gummer, as Minister of Agriculture,
originally agreed to consider developing the Organic Aid Scheme,
at a meeting with representatives of the organic movement in February
1991, at which I was present, he gave a clear verbal assurance
that any scheme he introduced would apply equally to existing
organic producers and to new entrants, in order to maintain a
"level playing field".
When the scheme was introduced in 1994, Mr Gummer
had moved to the Department of Environment and we were simply
told that existing producers were being excluded from the OAS
because of budgetary constraints. One senior MAFF civil servant
acknowledged to me a little later that there was in fact a considerable
amount of "rough justice" in relation to which organic
producers scraped into the scheme and which fell outside it. The
reason for this may be that the recording systems and certification
procedures of organic sector bodies at the time were less than
perfect.
While budgets are similarly tight today, at
a time when future levels of funding for organic farming are under
consideration, I feel it is not out of place also to detail some
of the other ways in which pre-1993 organic producers have been
discriminated against, by the introduction of organic conversion
support payments:
1. Some longstanding organic producers (myself
included) saw a significant, though fortunately short-lived (about
18 months), drop in demand for our organic livestock produce being
marketed locally, as a result of the arrival of large, new, subsidised
organic producers in our areas in the mid-1990's.
2. Pre-1993 organic producers have received
no special consideration in relation to the allocation of livestock
quotas, while new entrants have. The assumption was made that
all pre-1993 producers had optimal stocking levels when quotas
were introduced, but this was not universally the case.
3. OAS and OFS payments during years four
and five of the schemes, while modest, nevertheless puts new entrants
at a direct and unfair commercial advantage to existing producers,
since organic status is available by this stage and crops and
livestock can therefore be sold as "organic".
Before we embark on a further major expansion
in the area of organic production, may I therefore ask that you
and your fellow committee members give some consideration to what,
if anything might be done to restore a certain amount of parity,
and also perhaps to help some producers deal with specific problems
which arose principally due to the absence of advice and support
when they converted their farms?
Is it right, for example, that land which was
registered as organic in August 1993 should be forever excluded
from conversion support, even where it might now have been out
of organic production for several years and possibly even changed
hands? There has been an understandable reluctance to allow organic
farms to revert to chemicals to resolve problems and then return
to organic production, but if we introduced a principal that no
area of land could receive conversion support more than once,
then such an abuse would not occur.
In 1994 demand for organic produce was considerably
less strong than it is today and there were still no premiums
available for many organic livestock products. My suspicion is
that MAFF was concerned that if existing organic producers were
not excluded from the scheme, then large numbers of them might
have deregistered in order to obtain support. Today the situation
is very different and I feel that a more relaxed attitude could
safely be adopted, if it was totally clear that any land entered
into the OFS could not be counted as "organic" until
a full, approved conversion (or re-conversion) process had been
undertaken. My view is that only producers genuinely in need of
help and advice would now forego the organic premiums this would
involve.
I feel I should not try to hide the fact that
I have a potential vested interest in the points I am making,
and that if the scheme were varied in such a way, I might well
wish to have a second go at organic farming at some point in the
future.
19 October 2000
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