Ahead of RSPB’s event at the Hay Festival on 31 May, former Telegraph environment correspondent and author of Ethical Carnivore, Louise Gray, discusses why farming is important for us all.
Here’s an early memory of nature: I’m in primary school and we are learning about wild flowers: the poppies and oxeye daisies and cornflowers that I so love. I am in my element, day dreaming about red, white and blue flowers when the teacher interrupts my reverie:
‘Except there are no wildflowers in the fields any more, because Louise’s Daddy has killed them all.’
You see, I am a farmer’s daughter. I grew up on a farm in the 1980s and as well as the nature and freedom, I remember the spraying and the tractors of a modern farmyard.
I don’t blame my father for what he did. He was managing a working farm and putting food on the table. Not just my table, but people around the world.
But the intensive system of agriculture practiced across Britain has not come without consequences. The recent State of Nature Report published by the RSPB and 50 other organisations estimates that numbers of the nation’s most endangered creatures have plummeted by two-thirds since 1970 – that includes wildflowers as well as hedgehogs, skylarks and corn buntings. The paper blamed not only intensive farming but climate change and urbanization.
For me all of these are driven by one thing: consumers. It is us who demand cheap food, fast cars and car parks. If we want to solve the problem it is going to take all of us working together and taking tough decisions about how we live our lives.
The conversation has already begun with the RSPB and others putting pressure on government to develop a new way of farming that not only produces affordable food but clean air, fresh water and other so called ‘eco-system services.’
Hay Festival. Image: Sam Hardwick
Times are tough, with spending on the environment being cut, but it is also a time of opportunity. Like it or not Brexit is happening and that means the UK coming out of the Common Agricultural Policy that for decades has paid farmers subsidies.
A new agricultural policy will have to be written up and this is your time to make your voice heard. Should we only pay subsidies to farmers for protecting the environment? How do we ensure affordable food is produced in this country rather than importing from abroad?
At Hay Festival RSPB Cymru is bringing together voices from farming and conservation – as well as spoken word poet, Martin Daws, to express what we all sometimes struggle to articulate – to debate the future of farming.
In my view we need to farm the land in a way that protects biodiversity as well as producing food. To prove that is possible, I will give another memory of nature, a more recent one. I am standing in a field of wheat listening to a skylark, there are corn buntings on the telephone lines and poppies in the margins and standing by my side is the farmer, my father.
Louise Gray will be debating the future of farming and wildlife alongside special guests, including Ecologist and Chair of the RSPB, Professor Steve Ormerod, Welsh sheep farmer and Fairness for The Uplands representative, Tony Davies and Director of RSPB Cymru Katie-Jo Luxton. The event will take place on Wednesday 31 May at 1pm at the Hay Festival.
You can buy tickets here