Agriculture Minister, David Heath, seemed to enjoy Monday's visit to Hope Farm. While the skies were a little forbidding and lightning bolts crashed around us, we escaped a deluge and farm manager, Ian Dillon's record of never having to call off a farm visit remains intact.
As Defra prepares to implement the CAP deal and designs the new agri-environment scheme, I do think that there is a lot to learn from our experience at Hope Farm. The farmland bird package (including flower-rich margins, wild bird cover and in-field measures such as skylark plots) has been the key to our success at the farm. Unfortunately, although available to all farmers through the entry-level scheme, this has not had the take up that we had hoped. By offering a menu of options in the entry level scheme, farmers have been able to choose easy options such as grass margins which do little to benefit wildlife. This probably explains why the farmland bird index continues to bump along the bottom of the graph.
If some of these easier options were incorporated into the proposed greening conditions on 30% of farm support payments (so called Pillar 1 of the CAP), then this would free up more money to benefit farmland wildlife through well funded and well designed agri-environment schemes (under Pillar 2).
The visit of the Mr Heath attracted some attention from the farming press and I was glad to be able to support the minister's ambitions to transfer money from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2. You can see one of my windswept interviews here.
A minor distraction came from the President of the NFU, Peter Kendall, who had made some rather predictable comments about the future of farm subsidies and how farming should respond to the climate change crisis. The Guardian was one of the newspapers that ran the story and they were kind enough to publish my response yesterday (see here). Despite his job title, Peter is not representing all farmers as last month's letter to from the high nature value farming coalition demonstrated.
While there is still the small matter of the European Parliament needing to agree the European Budget for the 2014-2020 period, ministers do need to make decisions about CAP budget transfers and design of new schemes by the end of the year. For Defra ministers and officials to have any hope of recovering the 60% of farmland species which have declined over the past forty years, they will need to remember the Hope Farm experience and support the many farmers that want to support an attractive countryside rich in wildlife.
What did you think about Peter Kendall's comments about the future of farming?
It would be great to hear your views.
The way rspb has campaigned against so called Pillar 1 just made me wonder as I think Pillar one paid out mostly or completely on acreage does the rspb claim these payments for all those acres on its reserves even though as far as growing essential food for UK family's they really produce next to nothing.Surely if they do it is hardly ethical and in most cases the charities in such situations quote the phrase "as a charity we are required by our trustees to maximise our income".What a lovely get out.