Environment, Food and Rural Affairs CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Susan Atkinson
Fairness
1. To call something the Common Agricultural Policy implies that all farmers across the EU are treated as equally when in fact every country supports its farmer to different levels. Farmers in some other EU countries are supported with far more money than UK farmers and have far less bureaucracy imposed on them even when that is in contradiction to official EU policy. The recent arguments about battery hen cages and sow stalls demonstrate this, as does the UK putting 15% modulation away from direct payments to “rural development” when other countries re doing the opposite due to concerns about food supplies in a rapidly changing climate. However, the question that needs addressing is how to allow farmers to earn enough to allow them to have a decent standard of living in the bad years as well as the good and also provide stable food prices for the consumers. The needs of both groups must be regarded as equal rather than the consumer being put above the farmer as all too often seems to be the case.
2. It is difficult to divide tenant farmers from upland farmers when many are both. A tenant farmer used to be able to make a decent living from farming and, upon retiring, sell his stock and machinery and with the proceeds buy a suitable house in the neighbourhood and have a lump sum to put in the bank to supplement the state pension. I am a volunteer with the Farming Community Network (FCN) and know that many tenant farmers are unable to retire as they cannot afford to do so. The ARC Addington trust has been able to help a few farmers to move to suitable housing, but that is all. Again it comes down to the fact that the drive for ever cheaper food has meant many farmers now live in poverty. The uplands have always posed extra problems but they also provide some of the most beautiful scenery in the UK, a fact that thousands of tourists and hill walkers enjoy every year. Without the livestock managed by hill farmers this scenery would be lost and the consequences to the UK economy would be immense. So would the cost to the NHS as the physical and mental wellbeing or the population would decline also. Anyone trudging over a muddy footpath on a dank November day is there because they have a deep psychological need to be there. Yet these areas are paid the least under the present system and it is proposed that this carries on with the new system, paying less for upland areas as they are deemed to be less productive. If the land is decoupled from production, why is this? Farmers should be paid the same rate per hectare across the UK and then extra payments paid for managing the uplands in the traditional manner.
Bureaucracy
1. As my husband and I are both volunteers with the Farming Community Network (FCN) we are all too familiar with the problems caused to farmers by bureaucracy that is too complicated and administered according to petty rules. The present system of SFP was put in place with a needlessly complicated procedure that subsequently took many years to sort out all the problems it caused. For instance, if this system is supposed to be de-coupled from production, why are the payments on our own arable fields only applicable to the area that is actually cropped? If the environment is so important, why are the areas under the pylons (important areas of wildlife habitat) and ponds (ours contain great crested newts) removed and never added back in through the environmental schemes? Payment should be calculated according to the total field size. After two re-mapping exercises the Rural Land Registry should have the correct sizes in all but a few cases and also, increasingly more farms are now registered with the Land Registry itself. That would save endless re-measuring exercises to check farmers are claiming for just the right area. We do need to access our land so even the tracks are important to farmers.
2. When there is a problem, such as with a field boundary, why is the entire payment stopped and not just that of the field in question? Such actions can have a crippling effect on cash flow and lead to real hardship and, in some dire cases, suicide. Stoppages should be limited to only the matter in dispute.
3. Fields neither are exact squares or rectangles nor are they exact multiples of the width or, for example, a farmer’s plough, so why are the rules written as if they were? Why not average the width of margins round a field rather than insisting on exact 2 metres from the centre of a hedge, which is meaningless when some hedges are more than 4 metres wide? Making an average measurement permissible would mean farmers leaving odd shaped corners untilled and would make the process far less stressful.
4. Nobody is above making mistakes and there should be far simpler processes for correcting them, with perhaps a small additional fee, rather than all payments being frozen or a calf not being able to be registered. There is a great difference between human error and deliberate fraud and the former should not be treated as if it were the latter.
5. An active farmer is someone who derives the greater part of his or her income from farming their land. That means the person who receives CAP money should be the one doing the majority of the work, whether land owner or tenant and not those who regard land merely as an investment to be exploited.
Greening
1. Food production and environmental benefits are being treated as if they are separate entities when the reverse is true. The UK countryside has been created by centuries of farming and so the environment has been created by farming and will disappear if farming ceases. The plants in our grasslands have been grazed for thousands of years by our livestock and so have evolved in a system where they have always passed though animals guts before germinating. The result is that if they do not go through the guts of a sheep of cow, they do not germinate or do so only with great difficulty. Therefore the reduction in the number of cattle and sheep kept in the UK has seen bio-diversity decrease.
2. Also, the manure from a dairy cow deposited on pasture as it grazes can support up to 200 pounds in weight of insects per year. That in turn supports many species of birds wholly or in part. We farm in what was traditionally a dairy farming area, part of the Stilton cheese producing land. Once there were many dairy farms surrounding our farm and we were a dairy farm ourselves. As it became uneconomic for small herds to make a living, the cows disappeared and now there is one dairy farm only left. As the cows went, the birds declined in both species and number and the connection is obvious—no cows, no manure, no insects and no birds! The present push towards robotic milking machines means that the cows live indoors all year round, their manure is spread only as slurry and the natural process of cow pats decaying naturally on grass is lost, so this is also likely to be detrimental to the environment.
3. Every gardener knows that some plants are more vigorous than others when growing and so they have to be kept in check or they will swamp their weaker neighbours and thus kill them. The same happens in our fields and on our hills and under grazed land soon sees a decrease in bio-diversity as the weaker species are choked out. One only needs to look at the bracken covered slopes of Cumbria where the sheep were never re-introduced after 2001’s Foot and Mouth disease epidemic to see the truth of this.
4. In spite of all of this and the considerable amount of attention the environment receives, farmers are constantly subjected to mixed messages about it and food production. Big business prefers to deal with a few large suppliers and have sold successive governments the fallacy that big farms are far more efficient than small ones, when the reverse is true. Apart from the facts that animals do not grow faster or cows produce more milk because they are in large herds nor crops yield better on large farms Owen Patterson wants larger, more “efficient farms”. Large arable farms need large heavy machinery which puts tremendous pressure on soil structure in spite of low ground pressure tyres etc even in dry conditions. In wet conditions, the damage from such machinery causes damage that takes several years before the soil recovers (an issue that was repeated often in the recent dispute over sugar beet prices). Also, with large acreages to deal with, sprays etc. are put on as a blanket measure as there is no time to deal with fields as individuals. On our farm, my husband was able to wait last year until conditions were right and then combined crops that were less than 16% moisture with the combine travelling over dry ground, unlike those who had to combine in wet conditions and face high drying costs simply to get the crops harvested along with rutted fields and several combines wrecked through getting stuck In the mud. This year he was able to wait again while many farmers had to resort to spraying hundreds of acres of crops with glyphosate in order to get them to harvest more quickly when the harvest was so late.
5. This country has a very varied landscape ranging from mountains to flat areas of arable. It also has a great variety in how it is farmed, with fields having boundaries that are hedged, ditched or stone walled. There are regional variations in hedging and stone walling techniques. All are part of the nation’s heritage and should be valued as such and In equal measure. Giving payments for hedges and not stone walls is stupid as they both need manual work to maintain them and the latter are also havens for wildlife. Also ditches are important whatever species they contain, especially as our weather patterns become more extreme. One size fits all policies do not work. Every farmer knows that no two fields ar alike and so measures should allow for this diversity. Nobody wants the countryside to look uniform.
6. Much is made of the public goods farming delivers. Once farmers made a living from farming an f the public goods were free. Now the lack of income from food production means the costs of maintaining statuary rights of way etc needs to be paid for by the public, who really do not understand the term “public goods”. It is not just the cost of keeping the rights of way clear, but the losses caused by sheep worrying, trespass, accidental and malicious damage and so on also occurs. Make it clear that these costs to farming need to be paid for.
Lessons Learnt
1. What is the purpose of the CAP? Is it meant to be addressing the needs of both farmer and consumer because it is not doing so. Farming is in crisis with one in four farmers living below the poverty line. Some hill farmers are existing on less than £8,000 per year. Farm borrowing is increasing as farmers borrow more to live on, not to re-invest in their farms. The average age of farmers is 60 and there are few young people entering the industry. Hardly surprising when there are few prospects of earning a decent living in farming. At the same time the push towards academic qualifications only when it is the practical skills that provide what we need such as food means that manual work is regarded as only for those who cannot do anything else. At the same time the consumers are eating too much processed food, too few vegetables and fruit and so on and are suffering the subsequent health problems.
2. It is well known that for many farmers the SFP money is the entire profit (and often also used to pay the farms bills also) for most farms. Crops and livestock are being sold at or below the cost of production. A local accountancy firm estimated this year’s cost of wheat production at £160 per tonne (less than what it is making) and the dairy farmers are still getting less than the cost of production for their milk. This means the SFP money is not subsidising farms but big business, a fact that a large part of the general public now recognises. Also the question of how a farmer makes a living in a country where the average wage is now over £32,000 and is yet expected to compete with cheap imports is one that has yet to be answered.
3. As land is being bought by those who regard it either as an investment and/or an inheritance tax avoidance measure it has sent the price of land to astronomical levels. It is noticeable that it is prime arable land that these people are buying and not hill farms. Even so, the value of a small farm often over a million pounds, which means farmers are the only people expected to invest a seven figure sum in a business and effectively and up living on benefits!
4. Our weather is becoming ever more changeable and extreme and yet this country has no insurance scheme for crops such as enjoyed by American farmers (whose government pays the bulk of the premiums) nor does it pay emergency payments to farmers who have lost crops or livestock to natural disasters, again enjoyed by others. Those who lost livestock in this year’s weather problems did get help towards disposing of the bodies but it was farmers who gave fodder and haulage firms that transported it or the remaining animals could also have been lost to hunger. There needs to be money for such emergencies in future if the country is to have food security.
5. It is no good just trying to tweak the previous system and expect it to avoid the problems it has caused. The situation has changed since the idea of CAP was first thought up, due to climate change and food security becoming major issues and so a new system is needed.
7 October 2013