What will we say looking back at this period of transition, between Brexit and the end of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS)? That we threw off the “money for nothing” of BPS and embraced the golden future of Environmental Land Management (ELM)?
Or that in an increasingly complex, insecure world, we opted for more complexity, with food production as an afterthought?
Anyone who reads Farmers Weekly or attends farmer meetings will be well aware of the opportunities for “green” money in the post-BPS world.
See also: Sustainable Farming Incentive 2022 – what farmers need to know
Carbon credits, biodiversity net gain, nutrient neutrality – the environmental jargon is unfamiliar and confusing.
And that’s on top of understanding Countryside Stewardship (CS), and the three horsemen of the ELM apocalypse heading our way.
The people advertising these new opportunities say the market is developing, the money is there, so why not grab it?
After all, money from environmental stewardship has been part of the bottom line for farms for many years.
Maybe one day we’ll look back on the arrival of this “cash for contrition” as an age of opportunity.
But right now the haze around long-term contracts and income, the doubts about allowing developers and polluters to offload accountability, and the ethics of taking land out of food production, or even driving farmers off it, all make for huge uncertainty.
Add to this the crazy input prices, labour shortages, misapplied regulation, and the overwhelming sense of a government treating agriculture as a sacrifice in trade deals or a blank canvas for wilding schemes, and it’s no wonder farmers feel punch-drunk, adrift and looking for answers.
If there was ever a time for clear support for how farming is getting behind the environment at the same time as producing food, it is now.
But we are letting it slip by in diffuse, design-as-you-go and needlessly complex initiatives, cheered on by an environmental lobby that senses its time has come.
The normalisation of the environment in agriculture has come about through progressive farmers understanding that production is based in natural systems, not separate from them.
Working with these allows for healthy soils and water, and wildlife integrated with farming, not driven out of it. Support that and it’s job done.
New marketplace environmental opportunities don’t substitute for this, and the equal distribution of funds across the three ELM tiers sends the wrong signal.
Most farmers will have little chance to join in Landscape Recovery, and being stuck with poorly rewarded “sustainable farming” options will not replace BPS.
Looking back, we will say that we could have recognised food as a public good because it’s vital and the marketplace does not reward it adequately.
We could have continued to support food production through a new BPS, with an annual payment linked to and dependent on both in-field and wider landscape management options.
This support for farming would generate genuinely “green” outcomes.
It would be farmer-led, a lot simpler than ELM, and allow marketplace opportunities to play their proper role as carefully considered add-ons, not life-saving straws to clutch at.
The economist JK Galbraith coined the phrase “age of uncertainty” to contrast the self-assured 19th century with the turbulent 20th century.
Life has just got a lot more uncertain in the 21st century. It’s time to get the farming, food and environment balance right.
