There is a lot of talk at the moment about the benefits of re-wilding to such an extent that without too much debate the Government, encouraged and cajoled by various environmental lobbying groups, seem to have adopted a full steam ahead policy regardless of the consequences. And why not? I hear you say, it makes sense to encourage nature. Farming has been too intensive for too long. Let’s get back to nature, free the land from man’s destructive ways.
But then Russia invaded Ukraine. Ten percent of the Worlds grain comes from Ukraine and without a last minute agreement to open the ports millions of people faced starvation. Suddenly what we have all taken for granted, abundant food always available, has been brought into sharp focus. We can no longer rely on just importing everything we need. In fact, Brexit has also made this more difficult as there have been empty shelves in the supermarkets as Europeans found it easier to sell within the EU rather than negotiate around complicated import regulations.
The Ukraine war has concentrated the collective minds of the EU, Ireland has encouraged its farmers to grow more grain by offering subsidies. Farmers in Europe are subsidised to produce food, as we used to be pre-Brexit.
However, in the UK we are ditching the old EU subsidies and introducing a raft of environmental grants – farmers will no longer be paid to produce food but will be paid to withdraw land from production and plant trees.
I am being slightly ingenuous, some of the grants are helpful, particularly around animal welfare, but basically if all the different schemes are followed through there will be a large drop in available agricultural land as land is taken out of production. That is not the only threat to our food security, big investors keen to cash in on the production of green energy, have subsumed huge areas of good agricultural land and covered them in solar panels.
Of course we do have to produce more green energy and grow more trees, use less fertiliser and farm sustainably, but there has to be balance. Just importing more food is shifting responsibility for producing carbon emissions onto other less scrupulous producers in countries with fewer environmental controls.
Here’s an answer to saving our farm land and being more sustainable. Make every new home and factory install solar panels on their roofs and provide grants to install them on existing properties, just think of all those warehouses that could be covered in PV panels! All carparks could be covered in PV panels. Only pay for tree planting in low grade agricultural areas, scrubland or in tree belts to form wildlife corridors, but not good productive land. Encourage good farming practices with well thought out and long term policies backed by subsidies that reward farmers for farming. The current mixed bag of grants is confusing and rewards huge landowners, such as the National Trust and billionaires such as James Dyson, while penalising smaller family farms who don’t have the luxury of being able to set aside large chunks of their farmland for rewilding.
It is time we thought about food security rather than becoming obsessed with turning good agricultural land into scrubland.
