07 December, 2001

John Sheard discusses the implications of a keynote speech this week that points a way to farming's future and asks: are farmers ready?

A LONGTIME farming friend of mine, a man just turned 50 and owner of some 300 prime acres in the Lune Valley, is normally a man of equable temperament. So I was surprised the day he turned on me with a flash of temper.

I had asked him idly, over a pint, what he thought of rumours that, in future, he might draw most of his subsidy payments in the form of grants for conserving the countryside rather than producing milk.

He banged his pint down on the bar and snapped furiously: "No way. I'm a farmer - not a bloody park keeper."

That was before this year's foot and mouth disaster - which he fortunately escaped - but it was indicative of the views of many well educated, prosperous owner-occupiers in British agriculture.

If so, it will no doubt be presented to us as a flash of new inspiration from a reforming administration. Not so: this was first suggested to me more than ten years ago by Lord Peel, then running a huge sporting estate in Wensleydale and a senior Conservative Government official in the House of Lords.

For ever since Britain joined the then EEC some 30 years ago - and perhaps twenty years before that - farming subsidies which encouraged over-production of often unsaleable food have been wreaking havoc in the countryside.

Thousands of miles of hedgerow had been grubbed out to create prairie-size fields, robbing millions of wild birds, plants, mammals and insects of their natural habitats.

Yet even with all the benefits of the once mad Common Agricultural Policy, with its wine lakes and butter mountains, European farmers could still not compete on the world market as a level playing field: we just cannot produce wheat as cheaply as North America, beef from Argentina, or lamb from Australia and New Zealand.

Many people close to the industry have known this for decades. But it has taken the FMD tragedy to bring these facts home to the general, mainly urban, public - which pays the subsidy bills.

FMD revealed how little wealth farming creates in comparison to rural tourism, part of one of Britain's biggest and important industries and a major earner of foreign currency. Rural tourism depends on beautiful countryside. Ergo, the Countryside Agency believes, the former should support the latter.

Now I am all in favour of this. The contribution farming makes towards creating and husbanding our countryside has been overlooked for far too long. And does it matter if the farmer gets the same income for producing less food and spending more time maintaining footpaths, stiles, woods and watercourses?

Sadly, many of them will say, Yes, it does matter. I hope their leaders have enough sway to persuade them to go along with Government thinking. It is a lifeline after FMD, BSE and all the other food scandals. They should grab it and hold on tight.