Recent protests have made it clear, farmers are under immense pressure and the government must act quickly to improve relations with the sector and secure its future.
Farming is at a crossroads. England is already over halfway through the agricultural transition, in which former EU legacy farm support is being replaced with new Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes.
Last year, members of Green Alliance’s team visited six farms across England to gain a better understanding of the challenges they are facing and the support they want from the government during the agricultural transition. These were diverse, from lowland arable to upland livestock farms and spanned different sizes and ownership. We tell their stories in our latest report.
Relations with the government are strained
Our visits took place before changes to agricultural inheritance tax were announced in the autumn budget. Since then, the relationship between farmers and the government has become increasingly strained. In evolving its rural policy, the government needs to regain farmers’ trust while supporting them to manage their land in a way that delivers social and environmental benefits.
Although there are tensions, there are reasons for optimism. Our visits showed farmers are embracing the agricultural transition, putting nature right at the heart of their businesses. The arable farms we visited, E J Barker & Sons and Midloe Grange Farm, have set aside marginal areas of land for habitat creation and are prioritising sustainable farming practice. Challacombe Farm on Dartmoor is taking a ‘nature first’ approach, with organic meat as a secondary output. These sorts of changes are happening all over the country, with the number of agri-environmental agreements (where farmers get public money to deliver environmental improvements) more than doubling in the past four years.
Farmers need certainty
The lack of policy certainty is making life for farmers more difficult. This is a particular challenge for those who want to make big changes to their businesses in the coming years, like Elm Farm, a family-owned beef farm in Oxfordshire, which is considering whether reducing herd sizes and managing more of their land for nature may offer a route to profitability.
To allay these fears, the government’s promised farming roadmap should set out the vision for how ELM will evolve. The government should commit to raising the farming budget to meet the scale of need at the spending review. It’s estimated that at least £3.1 million is needed for farm support in England to reverse declines in nature.
Another issue is the level of support farmers are getting when they do receive it, as farmers told us that the payments available for woodland creation and peat restoration were particularly low given the labour this requires and benefits these land use changes deliver in terms of carbon sequestration and water quality improvements. Defra should also urgently review the payment rates in ELM, aligning them to reflect the level of these ‘public goods’ delivered. The Land Use Framework, now under consultation, should guide ELM payments to the right areas and support rural business growth.
Ambitions to do more for nature are being held back
Most of the farm budget is spent on the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), but this mostly helps lowland arable enterprises. The higher ambition ELM schemes, such as Higher Tier Countryside Stewardship and Landscape Recovery, which would better suit upland and marginal farms are still closed to new applications. This is leaving some farmers, who are stewards of the most scenic landscapes and land that is the highest value for nature, struggling to make a living, stuck in old schemes on low payment rates. Even with direct payments and the unpaid labour of the farmer and their family, upland grazing farms earned an average of just £12,700 in 2019. But this need not be the case: upland armers could increase their incomes by 50 per cent if they planted woodland on two thirds of their land, whilst continuing to graze the remaining land, if agricultural subsidies were reformed.
To support more farmers to work with nature, the government should honour its commitment to open up a new round of Higher Tier schemes and ensure the Rural Payments Agency and Natural England are adequately funded to quickly process new applications. It makes sense to set aside £1 billion of the ELM budget for the two most ambitious schemes by 2027.
Getting ELM working well isn’t the only challenge
In our conversations with farmers, we heard that extreme weather, caused by climate change, and unfair practices in food supply chains are harming their ability to make a profit. Research has found that farmers supplying supermarkets typically make less than 1p of profits for a range of common items. These are instead directed at intermediaries like processors and retailers.
Farmers want the government to regulate to level the playing field so they can secure fairer prices for their produce.
Smaller and upland farms, in particular, want tailored advice and more peer to peer learning opportunities, as they don’t have the time to stay on top of what the evolving support schemes can offer them. In our report, we’ve proposed a new sustainable farming advice scheme, combining business and ecological advice, using existing trusted resources, and a dedicated Strategic Knowledge Transfer Fund to support peer to peer networks.
ELM has the scope to improve farm livelihoods in marginal areas and support farmers to change land use positively to restore nature and tackle the effects of climate change. Visiting farms across the country gave us plenty of food for thought and informed our ideas for the immediate steps the government could be taking to address farmers’ concerns and get ELM on the right track.
Read more in our report, Farming at a crossroads: how farmers are navigating the agricultural transition , published today.
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