This is the vision document for farming launched at the Wildlife and Countryside Link event yesterday lunch time. It’s certainly worth a read.
The Wildlife Link organisations which signed up to this document (including the National Trust, RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, WWF, FoE and many others) would like to see farming which is:
- Better for nature – A farmed landscape that is rich in wildlife, with healthy functioning and resilient ecosystems
- Better for people – Approaches to food and farming that are fair to farmers and wider society, and which promote health and wellbeing for all
- Better for our land and our livestock – Farms that look after and respect the land, and the farm animals on which we depend
- Ready for the future – Farming and food production that can cope with the changes and challenges that lie ahead, as well as being able to capitalise on future opportunities
I don’t think many will disagree with that!
The difficulty is how to get there.
I think this document is a bit thin really, and its ability to ‘start a conversation between the Government, the farming community and civil society’ will be rather low. It’s a conversation which started a long time ago.
The key steps for long term change are probably correct:
- Embed long-term planning for nature’s recovery in future approaches to farming
- Make the Common Agricultural Policy fit for purpose
- Make regulation more effective
- Make taxes work harder for the public good
- Recognise the true value of the natural environment
- Inform and educate the public on healthy and sustainable diets
- Invest more in research and knowledge exchange
- Promote a thriving sustainable food chain
I suspect even the NFU and even Defra would be able to agree with all of these points. And although they are probably right, the words that accompany them appear to have been arrived at through a process of ‘blandification’ so that any bite in them is removed.
There are a couple of areas that are either missing or weak. If we are going to make the CAP fit for purpose it supposes that we’ll still be in the EU in a few years time. that is s a big and more immediate question. I guess that most WCL staff members are in favour of EU membership and that hardly any, if any, of their organisations have an agreed policy position on the subject.So, how are wildlife NGOs going to play a part in this big debate? And there can be nothing as potentially cataclysmic to the future of UK farming than a withdrawal from the EU. It’s an elephant in the room and in this document.
And although it is touched upon, or at least I think it is touched upon, the issue of value for money for taxpayer investment in farming should be much more prominent. Of course the farming industry wants stuff from government, and is very good at asking for it (see earlier blog on yesterday’s event) but it’s a long time since the Curry report (and I glimpsed Sir Don in the room for a while yesterday) pointed out that farming needed to reconnect with its customers, wider society and the environment.
Farming needs to realise, and internalise very fully, that we are its customers, we are the taxpayers and we are the people who pick up the bill for any negative externalities of farming. We don’t need to be shy about requiring a different type of farming, not pleading for it. And government should be acting for the taxpayer and the consumer (as well as wildlife). NGOs should be stirring up their members to make value for money for the taxpayer and consumer much more of an issue.
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My only thought about this is this constant talk about tax payers money going to farmers.
In certain instances it obviously needs sorting out by putting a cap on it so that large land owners who often are not farmers in the true sense of the word or at least often are not true food producers do not benefit from ordinary peoples taxes.
On the other hand it is talked about so often as to be boring and probably wrong anyway to my way of thinking.
Over many farming years I am certain that I paid more in taxes than what I received in subsidies,to benefit lots of Public employees who often retire with a big pension while still relatively young while the ordinary farmer unless he pays 100% of his own money into a pension fund has no benefit like that and carries on working maybe fifteen years longer than those early retirees.
Funny but we never seem to hear about the other side of the coin.
Maybe we should consider these subsidies to be part of his pension pot.Now there is a thought for Jeremy,he is after all a strong union man,does that include the National Farmers Union I wonder,after all I would say that most working farmers work at least as hard as almost any trade unionist.
“Over many farming years I am certain that I paid more in taxes than what I received in subsidies,to benefit lots of Public employees who often retire with a big pension…”
I think you may not be seeing the whole picture here Dennis. I think that your taxes contributed to more than just the pensions of civil servants and probably went towards a whole variety of things, some of which you potentially benefit from, such as roads, the health service, farmers, etc.
Secondly, all working people pay taxes, not just farmers, but most taxpayers don’t receive a subsidy in return. There may be good reasons for subsidising food production but the fact remains that all tax payers contribute to the income of farmers and it is therefore reasonable that the question of what we get in return should be asked. It seems to me to be fair enough to expect that the subsidy should in part be conditional on meeting agreed standards of environmental protection.
As I think I’ve commented before Dennis, I’m fairly sure you’ve fallen for the old dairy farmers trap of failing to account for milk intervention, which was nothing more than a subsidy, albeit an indirect one.
Apart from a couple of bits of mantra that they couldn’t leave out – what’s not to like?
The keys steps missed out the dismantling of the tax advantages conferred on the ownership of land. These stand in the way of food, water and housing provision for us and provide better investment potential – safer than prime property or gold – for them what have made a lot of new money out of exploiting the labours and stripping the assets of others. Or at the Trough of Unreliables, paid for by the labours or pensions of the poor who can’t hide their money in the same tax-efficient ways.
Only £2Bn from tax payers? Didn’t I hear £3Bn from the SoS for Pork? Whatever – into an industry that creates £300Bn it doesn’t seem bad VfM when you consider that an alleged 1 in 5 of the population is employed in some way in the food supply chain. That’s about 14.5M peeps. That’s a lot of voters. No wonder there is such a drive to keep them employed even if it means the export of their produce that originated on “our” land paid for by “our” money. As they massively outnumber the farmers that supply some of their raw materials it does beg the question as to the true beneficiaries of subsidy. And that doesn’t even touch the recycling of money into the local rural economy by farmers that – contrary to popular stereotyping – don’t exist in some kind of idyllic rural vacuum where they don’t need to buy anything and whittle tractors from a hazel wand and pack the kids off to school in Candleford with a cheese sandwich and an apple. If, indeed, there is a school … . But we should be careful what we wish for regarding subsidy reform if we don’t want to become China’s pork farm as a complement to its dairy farm, formerly known as New Zealand.
Jonathon,well you do agree really as you say much the same.
Only a small proportion of anyones taxes goes to farming subsidies just the same as you point out only a proportion of my taxes go to fund others pensions.
The really strange thing is the pointless carping about all farmers getting subsidies as almost certain it is a EU and guess the total population of EU makes the possible one or two million in UK who want benefits for there hobby above what the other near on sixty million are happy with look even more minuscule than ever.
Even more appropriate is the fact that throughout the EU and I would think even the rest of the world there are all sorts of often hidden subsidies that mean to have a relatively level playing field farming without subsidies only in the UK would be senseless.
Ernest,I do think my assumption is probably correct as probably that is almost the only subsidy I did receive except a small bit for type of trimming hedges bi-annually etc.but what I gained from the milk intervention is impossible for me to know,but I am confident that the public got a good deal from myself and thousands of others buying relatively cheap milk from our labours from 6.AM to 6 PM seven days a week and 52 weeks a year which meant they had a guarantee of either delivery of milk every day or off the shelf every without any thought that we might have a powerful enough union to call a vote and strike.
I think all those benefits mentioned plus only dairy farmers know the rigorous tests every days milk goes through that must make it as good as any in the world and substantially better than most I would think.
Couple all that with the fact that milk being a good useful food that probably cured rickets cases prevalent at one time and often cheaper than water in bottles then it is a small price to pay a minute amount of anyones taxes for the milk intervention.
Of course it was probably not done for dairy farmers benefit although we obviously gained from it but it was almost certainly done as a guarantee of having enough milk every single day for the general public.
Hi Dennis
I do not begrudge you receiving a subsidy nor am I suggesting that agriculture should not be subsidised. However, whilst I cannot comment on the amount of tax-payer support you personally may have received during your career, the subsidy received by the industry as a whole is not as trivial as you seem to be at pains to suggest. For many farms the Single Farm Payment has been vital in making the difference between financial survival and bankruptcy.
At the same time we have seen over a long time now, the wildlife steadily draining away from much of the countryside. Like it or not, modern farming methods are inimical to much wildlife and the data clearly show the steady decline in birds, bees, butterflies and wild flowers to name but a few. Of course, farmers are not deliberately seeking to eliminate all wildlife on the land they manage but are seeking to manage their businesses as efficiently as they can within the economic environment in which they find themselves and nature is simply the unfortunate casualty of this.
It follows from this that if we want to stem the loss of wildlife from the agricultural landscape we somehow have to make it more financially worthwhile for farmers to protect nature and making farming subsidies a bit more conditional on implementing wildlife friendly practices seems to me to be the best way to achieve this. As a tax payer I am interested to see that, wherever they are deployed, the taxes I pay are used effectively and beneficially.
If you do not agree with this then I assume that you hold one or more of the following to be the case: (a) you do not think wildlife is declining in the countryside; (b) you think the decline of wildlife in the countryside has nothing to do with farming; (c) you think that modern farming methods do have a harmful impact on wildlife but there is no solution so we just have to wring our hands and put up with it or (d) you think that modern farming methods are harmful to wildlife but you have an alternative proposal as to how to address the problem. I would be very interested to hear which of these you think to be the case and why.
Best wishes
Jonathan (not Jonathon, by the way!)
Hi Dennis,
Not for one minute was I doubting your work ethic or the quality of the product that you worked so hard to produce. The point I was making is that I have met many dairy farmers over the years who have overlooked just how much they have historically benefited from milk intervention, which is or rather was a subsidy.
For much of the late 70’s and 80’s, dairy intervention was THE biggest single area of expenditure within the whole EU CAP budget. As you say its very difficult to quantify exactly how much you will have benefited, but the value of milk intervention is fairly well illustrated by the arrangements that were put in place in 2005 to compensate dairy farmers for the reduction in intervention rates. The SPS rate for English dairy farmers in 2005 was set at €245/ha (around £350/ha). Even at that rate many people still felt that this was below the value of intervention.
I certainly don’t know of any arable or livestock based farming enterprise at the moment that would paying more income tax than they receive in Pillar 1 & Pillar 2 payments. This years BPS rate is estimated to be approx. £180/ha once modulation, financial discipline deductions etc have been made. For a farm to be paying the equivalent of £180/ha in corporation tax, this would would require them to making a pre-tax profit of £900/ha! But furthermore for most farms, that pre-tax profit for most farms is calculated after the mortage/rent, council tax, utility bills have been paid. That is not a benefit that most taxpayers enjoy.
By the way, over the years I have spent quite a bit of time working on various farms. I spent 6 months working on a dairy farm when I left university, so I know how hard the job is – especially for those of us that started at 4.45am and didn’t have the luxury of a 6am start! 😉