Britain’s farmers have been led on a ten-year journey, from being proud and respected food producers, to reinventing themselves as environmental custodians. Farming relies on long-term decisions, and this has been no different – requiring years of planning and careful implementation, for the promise of long-term benefits. But earlier this month, when many farmers finally had plans in place, the door was slammed in their faces with the government’s sudden removal of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI): the main financial support for the change.
Since WW2, when Britain was so nearly starved into submission, our farmers have been subsidised; initially through price guarantees, then through the Single Payment and Basic Payment Schemes, paid per acre. The first produced food mountains and annoyed our trading partners with the dumping of surpluses; the second delivered little for taxpayers or the environment. It is hard to argue with Michael Gove’s 2018 suggestion that “public funds” paid to farmers should be dependent on the delivery of “public goods”. The difficulty was always going to be finding a universal, meaningful measure of “public goods” for the distribution of those funds. How do you value an oak tree, relative to an earthworm, an endangered bird, a kilogram of sequestered CO2 or a clean river? Our complex, diverse ecosystems defy the over-simplification of a single monetary metric.
Even so, farmers have invested countless hours and thousands of pounds into developing plans for managing their farms under the SFI. Where to plant trees, which hedges to restore, which soil conservation measures to adopt… Most people needed to employ consultants to help them navigate all this, who will still need to be paid. Every hour spent attending briefing meetings, assessing options, and preparing funding applications is an hour not spent farming. Every pound spent on consultants is a pound not invested in our farms. And after this colossal waste of time and money, there is a palpable sense of betrayal. How can any farmer make good decisions when the government’s approach is so unreliable?
The government must offer financial and legislative stability to farmers. The productive, ecological farming that the UK so urgently needs will require long-term investments, which farmers can only make when they feel stable and confident – the very opposite of what they are experiencing right now.
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers, every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical and business issues he feels strongly about.
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