Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 5 MARCH 2008
MR PETER
KENDALL, MR
ANDREW CLARK
AND MR
MICHAEL PAYNE
Q20 David Taylor: Decades?
Mr Payne: Yes, it is possible
that some—
Q21 David Taylor: The farmers I talk
to talk about generations in one case.
Mr Payne: The British Geological
Survey has referred to up to 120 years. That would be an extreme,
but we could still be looking at the effect of war-time ploughing
in some areas.
Q22 David Taylor: How have Defra
and the Environment Agency responded to the analysis you have
provided to them?
Mr Payne: We provided this analysis
over two years ago, for the first time, and Defra's analysis in
the consultation document, which was issued a few months ago,
looked no further than the last five years. It conceded that 77%
of surface waters had downward or static trends over the last
five years, but it did not ask the question going further back.
Q23 David Taylor: One final question.
Could you instance a significant river with an upward trend?
Mr Payne: The River Wensum in
Norfolk. It is ground water fed.
Q24 David Taylor: Near Norwich itself?
Mr Payne: Yes.
Q25 Mr Williams: We are talking about
nitrates. There used to be a concern about nitrites as well. Is
that an issue or is that an entirely different matter?
Mr Payne: It is not an entirely
different matter because nitrate in the body is converted directly
into nitrite predominantly by bacteria on the tongue, I understand.
I am not a medical person myself, but I have read quite a lot
about it.
Q26 Mr Williams: But it is not an
issue in terms of water quality?
Mr Payne: No, it is not an issue
in terms of agricultural water quality.
Q27 Miss McIntosh: You mentioned
at the outset, Peter, a cost-benefit analysis and you mentioned
the cost particularly to dairy farmers. Presumably it will be
dairy, pig and poultry farmers that are affected. What would you
say was the average income of an average farm?
Mr Kendall: I think it is one
of the dangers of averages.
Q28 Miss McIntosh: Presumably the
income stream is not that high at the moment, particularly for
pig farmers?
Mr Kendall: The pig and poultry
sector are definitely, as you saw yesterday from the media—
Miss McIntosh: I met Winnie!
Q29 Chairman: She is our next witness!
Mr Kendall: There is real concern
about people's ability to pay and, I think, when you look at the
fact that so many of these proposals are across the board, what
we want to do is make it so it is much more specific to the problem
in the area rather than Defra just saying these across the board
responses, and that is where our fundamental objection comes with
the Action Plan.
Q30 Miss McIntosh: Presumably it
will be subject to cross-compliance; so before any of your farmers
can sign up to the Single Farm Payment, you will have to have
cross-compliance with this Directive.
Mr Kendall: Yes.
Q31 Miss McIntosh: You had expressed
earlier some unhappiness with the designation of the methodology
that was used. Are you satisfied with the revised methodology?
Would you like to tell us what the issues are?
Mr Payne: We are not entirely
satisfied. We believe it is a substantial improvement on the methodology
last time, which had certain specific faults. It is very much
work-in-progress. This is the view of the Environment Agency.
The NFU was represented on the Technical Nitrate Group which looked
at this, but there are certain aspects of the methodology which
we feel are unfortunate. For example, the decision to include
the whole of a river catchment, including uplands which contribute
very little nitrate, but where there is a failing point downstream
the last two UK methodologies have gone the whole way up to the
source, despite the fact that water draining from the higher levels
is well below 50mg/l and is, in fact, diluting the higher concentrations
lower down. There would be other aspects that we would be concerned
about. For example, the NFU received a letter from the then Minister,
at the time the Nitrates Directive was agreed, in which he informed
us of a number of options for minimising the size of zones which
the UK had negotiated into the Directive, such as the choice of
monitoring points, and it is unfortunate that those options have
not actually been used.
Q32 Miss McIntosh: You alluded earlier,
Michael, to what other Member States were doing and how it was
being applied. Would you say that farmers in this country are
being unfairly discriminated against by the extent of the catchment
area and particularly the percentage of England that will fall
within the Directive?
Mr Payne: I think it depends on
how you look at it. A number of Member States have decided to
designate their whole territory as a matter of approach, but you
would find that quite a lot of those Member States would have
very serious ecological problems because they drain into the Baltic
or the Eastern North Sea which have had very severe ecological
problems. The UK does not have severe ecological problems. We
have some technical problems with a highly precautionary nitrate
standard for drinking water. I think if you just looked across
Member States, you could say that eight or nine Member States
have designated their entire territory but their circumstances
are different. It does depend on your starting point. We do feel
that the approach is unnecessarily rigorous.
Q33 Miss McIntosh: Will it impact
more on surface water or ground water in England?
Mr Payne: Most of the designations
are either surface water or overlaps between ground water and
surface water, so surface water mainly.
Q34 Chairman: I am interested in
the evidence which the Environment Agency sent to us. They say,
"Applying the Action Programme throughout England will place
an excessive and unnecessarily financial burden on farmers in
low nitrate areas." It sounds to me as if they have sort
of said universal application is not a good idea, but you have
still been critical of the way they have identified certain areas.
Just to pick up on the point that Anne was making, you, I think,
drew our attention to the fact that some of their evidence in
the designation process was factually inaccurate. How did they
respond to that when you confronted them with this?
Mr Clark: I think it is right
to say, and Mike will probably want to come in on this one, that
the 2002 methodology used to designate areas, when those areas
are then re-run through the new methodology, 6% of the area appeared
to be misidentified. It could be that not only are there areas
outside, as it were, the whole territory that should not ever
be designated, but also areas within the 2002 Action Programme
area which also should not be identified, but perhaps Mike can
say a little bit more on the detail of that.
Mr Payne: Yes. We did have specific
issues with the 2002 methodology which the new improved methodology
has highlighted, as Andrew has referred to. I think our major
issues are probably not so much with technical errors but with
policy decisions to designate wider areas in principle rather
than narrow areas which we could have opted to do quite legitimately.
Q35 Miss McIntosh: If you were to
itemise, in order of importance, the changes you would like to
see to the Defra Action Programme, what would they be?
Mr Kendall: I will start. Certainly
the issue of closed periods we would like to be addressed.
Q36 Miss McIntosh: Does that have
an impact on winter crops?
Mr Kendall: We are talking about
storage of slurries at this moment in time. I will come to cover
crops in a second, if I could. The shortening of the closed periods:
this notion that we have just had incredibly dry weather in this
period of time now. The weather becomes more unpredictable and
having closed periods that do not relate to the weather conditions
and/or particularly the positions of farms, I think, is a real
worry to us. The storage requirements being linked to the farms
rather than the closed periods, we think, is more pragmatic and
practical and could be worked on as well. We think also the whole
notion of cover crops for environmental reasons needs further
work. I farm on very heavy clay. I still grow spring crops. To
try and put a cover crop in, then plough it up in January and
try and knock it down again, I just would not grow spring crops.
The practicality of that, and that not being targeted where we
believe the problems of leaching might occur, is an area we want
to see changed, and the other one we know Defra are looking to
appeal against is the derogation from 170 kilos to 250 kilos.
Q37 Miss McIntosh: Have you made
these points?
Mr Clark: We have set out our
main priorities in our main consultation to Defra; we set out
44 recommendations for changes. We have got an edited list, which
we provided to the Committee, under paragraph 26, table two, but
if I was going to capture it, I think, as Peter rightly says,
cover crops, something we have not talked about a lot in the evidence
session so far, is an absolutely critical area. It was dropped
into the consultation very late and we certainly did not have
any opportunity to discuss that in detail with many of the horticultural
producers that are concerned—the sugar beet producers, who
already have suffered major concerns with changes to their regime,
as well as potatoes—so we would see a substantial need to
change cover crops and to think again on that. The breakage in
the link between your storage requirement on a farm and the closed
period that applies to your farm is quite illogical to many farmers.
If they are seeing a range of different closed periods on their
farm, and you might have two or three different soil types, grassland
and arable—they all have different types of closed periods—the
cumulative effect of that on one farm would be different to the
cumulative effect on a different farm. Surely that means that
storage should be linked to the farm's capability to spread safely
rather than some arbitrary 22-weeks, 26-weeks' storage requirement.
Q38 Miss McIntosh: You are still
unhappy about spreading locations and spreading techniques?
Mr Clark: Yes. Going back to an
earlier point we made about activities that farmers can do to
improve their lot: being responsible understanding what your land
is capable of doing, that is the sort of thing which we believe
is important.
Q39 Miss McIntosh: You say you would
like to see reduced bureaucracy. How would you see that happening?
Mr Clark: We think that we can
promote a responsible approach within the industry. We have got
a proven record already within the voluntary initiative on pesticides.
We are at the moment developing a professional nutrient management
initiative which is trying to get a consistent baseline which
aims particularly at the grassland sector, where we think there
can be further improvements to nutrient management to make the
most of it. Encouragement from incentives to follow that approach
is a far better way than saying: "You must have so much slurry
storage; you have got to have these compulsory closed periods",
irrespective of their impact.
Mr Kendall: Some farmers think
initiatives like the voluntary initiative is bureaucratic. What
we are trying to do is find practical responses that do not involve
those very vast sums of money being spent in the wrong place,
in the wrong quantities. We think best practice is getting people
to understand. If I can go back to my very earliest point, these
nutrients are incredibly valuable. When you see bagged fertiliser
today at £300 per tonne, for example, the prospect of having
these valuable nutrients in the water course is no good to anybody,
so we are trying to engender how we can get these in the right
place at the right time. As I said, some farmers might think demonstrating
that good practice is bureaucratic, but we think it is better
than spending all that extra money.
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