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0 The writer is the author of ‘Rooted’
For the past five years, British farming has been lit up by the excitement of change. Brexit meant a break with the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. Subsidy payments were finally going. Rather than simply being paid for how much land you farmed, you could now be paid for what you did to it. Control was finally returning to farmers.
I discovered all this when my husband and I took on the running of his parents’ small arable and pasture farm in Suffolk. I found the agricultural world in flux, very different from the one I remembered growing up as a farmer’s granddaughter. The barley barons of my childhood were long gone. Now farmers were held ransom by the supermarkets, on some foods making just 8 per cent of the price customers paid for the product they grew. Land owned by pension funds, cashing in on public money, was farmed by contractors who would harvest on schedule, rain or shine, rather than by the weather.
Add to that the doubling in artificial fertiliser price over the past year and growing number of herbicide-resistant weeds, and business as usual was becoming untenable.
Then I came across a regenerative farming revolution spreading across the countryside. Farmer-led, it placed nature-based solutions and soil regeneration at its heart and was brought about, in part, by the end of subsidy payments. Under their replacement — the Environmental Land Management Scheme (Elms) — farmers were going to be paid for how they managed their land, not for merely owning it.
This message was driven by a new generation of first-time farmers fired up by the potential of both feeding the nation and saving the environment. They spread the word on social media, WhatsApp groups and get-togethers all over Britain. A younger cohort suddenly had the carrot they needed to persuade their parents to take a risk on change.
These farmers were reclaiming both their autonomy and their profits: nature-based solutions, rather than those distributed from a bag or bottle, are free. Benefits go beyond the farm gate. This way of farming stored carbon, increased biodiversity and improved soil’s ability to hold and filter water which prevented downstream flooding and river pollution.
Although a recent study proved that overall yields in such agri-ecological farming were the same as or higher than conventional methods, these farmers prized quality over quantity. Production-based farming may have produced enough food globally to feed up to 2bn more people than currently exist but 40 per cent of this is lost or wasted, and what we do eat is not nourishing us. In the UK, 3.7mn households do not have their nutritional needs met and nearly one-tenth of the entire NHS budget is spent on preventable diet-related diabetes.
The farming industry — not known for its flexibility — soon caught on to this new way of doing business. Farmers’ Weekly magazine featured articles on regenerative farming, the benefits of herbal leys (seed mixtures) and agroforestry. The annual Groundswell Regenerative Farming Festival went from hosting 450 people to 5,500 in just six years. On walks to discuss hedge management, farmers competed over how many turtle doves they had, rather than how big their wheat yields were.
As DJs, rock stars and models began talking about soil regeneration, farming was becoming cool. Agriculturalists abroad watched eagerly to see if Britain could become the blueprint for environmentally sensitive food-production.
Then, at the end of September, news began to leak that it all might be undone. “I opened up my diary and found lots of Defra meetings cancelled,” Martin Lines, chair of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, told me. “Others were in the same position.”
Ben Goldsmith, a former Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs director, fired off a series of tweets about the rumours that environmental payments were set to be scrapped in a regressive return to land-based payments. Furious farmers were quoted in the media. An online video from the very new secretary of state, Ranil Jayawardena, stated that Elms was being reviewed and not scrapped, but it brought little reassurance.
The government may have been prepared for heat from environmental groups, who have never exactly been their core base. They were not expecting this backlash from the farming community, which had seen the potential for a radical change in food production. A Defra denial that Elm was to be scrapped failed to dispel fears.
Last year, Defra released a leaflet entitled “Farming Is Changing”. This new government’s mistake was failing to realise that farming has already changed. In threatening to make a bonfire of Elms, they risk something else. The rural conservative vote, so often taken for granted, might just go up in flames instead.
