Am looking forward to today. I have a meeting with our Council this morning which is always fun. And tonight I am giving a talk to the South East England Agricultural Society. We are debating whether conservation is compatible with intensive farming.
I am not sure what sort of reception to expect, but I am sure it will be colourful evening. Judging by the state of the farmland bird and farmland butterfly indices, you could conclude that it is not possible to reconcile seemingly competing interests. But it is always worth remembering that it was farming practices that allowed many of the species which we now value to flourish. Many species even owe their vernacular names to their association with agriculture: cornflower and corn bunting to name but two.
But as we became better at producing food from our land - a fourfold increase in yield since 1945 - and as the Common Agriculture Policy exerted its influence, farmland wildlife suffered.
Great efforts have been made by many farmers over the past decade to try and reverse the declines but alas, the two biological indicators still show numbers are bumping along at the bottom of the graph. Some of the solutions are in our grasp - environmental stewardship can be made to work harder, payment rates for these schemes need to provide sufficient incentive for farmers to take up the right options and the new CAP must, of course, be made fit for purpose.
Given that so much of our nation is farmed, it is pretty clear that, if we want to recover farmland wildlife, we have no option other than to find harmonious coexistence between nature and farming. This is why I am so pleased that Defra, in its Natural Environment White Paper, committed to explore the question about how to improve productivity whilst enhancing the envirionment.
With luck, we should get a chance to explore some of the solutions at tonight's debate.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Do you think that it is possible to increase productivity whilst enhancing the environment? If so how? If not, what do we do?
It would be great to hear your views.
Martin - I thought productivity increase was 6 times - but that may be arable only ? (important because that's where the greatest issues are). Either way, we're producing massively more than the architects of the 1947 agriculture act which still underpins our 'more, cheaper food' approach could ever have dreamt of. When the RSPB got into agriculture in the mid 1980s I had a vision of farmland bird declines checking and then reversing - as has happened in forestry. Not a chance - what we've seen is wildlife being srewed down tighter and tigher - and the tragedy is that its probably had a tiny effect on productivity - as the scruffier land, maybe just 3 or 4% on intensive arable farms has been squeezed and squeezed - is it really too much to ask for maybe 5, not even, 7% for birds and the environment in revised CAP regs ?