Farmers would prefer to work in an unsubsidised market driven “environment” but would qualify this with a requirement to be on a relatively equitable footing with their competitors. Competition is the most effective stimulus to efficient systems. We should be seeking to move to a situation in which outputs that can be traded should not be subsidised, whilst those that have intrinsic as opposed to market value will be supported by tax payers, for example habitat or flood protection.

Farming has declined in the UK for various reasons. Firstly this has occurred because a succession of Governments have not valued it and in consequence have done less than Governments in competitive countries to be helpful in terms of issues such as regulation gold plating, cutting Research and Development expenditure and accessing EU funding. Margaret Thatcher’s rebate has resulted in the Treasury having a major disincentive when it comes to matching EU funding. Secondly until recently exchange rates have been unhelpful. Thirdly the “turf war” or more accurately the market share “war” between our major retailers, which by the way continues unabated, has been influential; these retailers are powerful enough to dictate market prices and thus override market stimuli. Single issue NGO, have had a disproportionate influence because they have been very good at promoting their relevant issue. Finally farmers have not helped themselves; they have not kept their consumers informed and have not behaved as businessmen and women. Few benchmark their enterprises accurately and few are prepared to forego their insularity and cooperate effectively with their peers.

Of all the contributions the one that caught my eye was Professor Harvey’s, particularly his point about putting emphasis on processes rather than merely debating outcomes. However flawed it is, the market should in principle operate whenever possible. All the “players” involved in rural policy, Government, Consumers (taxpayers), Retailers, Packers/Processors, Farmers, NGO’s should consider the processes required to achieve a balance between a thriving environment, social well being and rural commerce. Our existing environmental schemes are not perfect but have much to offer; they must be maintained whilst allowing greater flexibility in different geographical areas. We need to return to the pre 1980’s situation as far as Research and Development is concerned and recognise the importance of applied research. Whilst recognising that first generation GM crops have been a mixed blessing, the technique has enormous potential, subject to any outputs being carefully scrutinised. We must value, indeed treasure, the UKs productive land and recognise that the most important legacy we can give to our children is the maintenance of productive land in good condition.

1. The UK does not currently have a sustainable food policy. We are currently only 60% self sufficient, declining from over 80% about 20 years ago. World food shortages insist that we set an example by targeting self sufficiency. There are overwhelming strategic economic and food security reasons for reversing this trend. The process of reversal has a three to four year time lag in some livestock sectors.
2. Keynesian analysis demonstrates that agricultural production is as close to the Perfect Market as any production system. There is therefore an inherent tendency for swings from overproduction and economically unviable price to under production and high prices. Such markets are vulnerable to oligopoly purchasing power.
3. Mechanisms are required for agricultural commodities to equate supply and demand at economic price for both producer and consumer. The CAP relied upon intervention buying. This was intended to have a “Gasometer” leveling effect on supply. However the system was operated inefficiently as the route into intervention became one way and surpluses were offloaded onto the world market.
4. The replacement of production linked subsidy by a Single Payment without rationale is an abdication of responsibility to both producers and consumers. Whilst we have experienced a prolonged period of overproduction and consequential break even prices for agricultural commodities, the demand for crops with energy production potential has demonstrated how quickly prices rise when demand increases against an inflexible short term supply.
5. There is currently no agricultural policy in the CAP. We have an illogical payment system, a partly competitive environmental subsidy policy, a bureaucratic desire to regulate rather than subsidize, and much talk about diversification. The objective of a level playing field in the CAP has been eroded and with it belief in the “natural advantage” distribution of land use.
6. There is an urgent requirement in the UK to provide market intervention to reverse the decline in self sufficiency and to iron out the fluctuations of supply, demand and price that are and will otherwise occur. There is an essential requirement to balance the percentage of production diverted from food to energy production. The UK intervention, quota and price support system prior to entry into the CAP provides a useful blueprint for an effective agricultural policy.
7. A voluntary code to prevent the exercise of oligopoly power is ineffective as evidenced by the recent fines to purchasers in the dairy sector. Fines do not redress the inequity to producers.
8. The beauty of the English countryside still delights and surprises quite regularly and unexpectedly. Farmland birds appear to be on the increase, their greatest threat a rapid growth in protected birds of prey. I share the concern at 100% removal of setaside without replacement with a patchwork of natural habitat particularly in predominantly arable areas. The RSPB survey advertised on the radio is not a very scientific method of determining bird populations.
9. There is very little natural environment in the UK, most countryside being the result of generations of land management. Our current landowners and farmers should be congratulated for the Countryside we enjoy today, despite economic pressure and development. I detect a short term tendency to undervalue inherited knowledge.
10. I note from reported cases that the principal actions for water pollution have been brought against water supply companies. Diffuse pollution does not appear to be an exact science. Nitrate levels in water have fallen significantly in the last ten years.
11. I am surprised that genetically modified crops are considered as a food production solution. The potential environmental damage from tampering with the natural building blocks of nature is extreme. The science is in its infancy and I believe that DNA will prove to be elusively complex. I can find no justification for their use in the UK, Europe or the developed world, and the greatest risks probably lie in the developing and third world. There is possibly a case for experimental research under rigorous scientific control for energy crops. I agree that agricultural research and development should be restored following recent dissipation.
12. The uplands and much of our Countryside is conducive only to livestock production. Landscape value and accessibility for recreation deteriorate if not grazed and managed. Meat was not sold to us by a clever advertising campaign; it is a part of our diet that has evolved naturally. Farm livestock are as much a part of our biodiversity as any other species. An agricultural system denied inorganic fertilizer will benefit from organic fertilizer produced by livestock to maintain reasonable vegetable, cereal and oil seed yields.
13. A population of 60 million does not equate with a return to “good life” living in the UK. I agree that children benefit from an introduction to gardening. I hope Cornwood Agricultural & Horticultural Show will forgive me for revealing that they have a class for the child at their local primary school who produces the highest yield of potatoes from a supplied tub and seed potato. The children learn about various husbandry considerations in the process of growing their potato. Yes, this is a prize coupled to production, and no consolation prizes for the greatest diversity of eelworm.
14. Sourcing cheap food from abroad conveniently ignores health & safety and welfare regulations in the UK. I am constantly surprised how a nation which insists quite correctly upon high standards of welfare for its farm animals can so readily buy products from Countries with no such restrictions.
15. Concern for the environment appears to have taken a vacation in the proposal that the remaining 30% of our coastline currently protected from human intrusion should be opened to public access. Science requires a control to validate an experiment, and estuaries and stretches of coastline without access should be preserved on a “game reserve” principle in the interests of bio-diversity. I was obliged one Sunday afternoon to watch a terrier not on a lead terrify a swan for over an hour near its nesting site on coastal mud. The owners were incapable of intervening as the mud would not support their weight.
16. The answer is quite emphatically no, and now is always the time to begin to redress the absence of agricultural policy.

Animal farming dominates that damage.

The average British diet uses roughly three times the land, water and energy of a balanced plant-based diet. That’s because farmed animals use most of the calories from their feed to live and grow. Most intensive animal farming is actually a food destruction process.

To make UK land use sustainable, we humans need to eat lower down the food chain.

The Cabinet Office’s Strategy Unit Food Policy Review (due in April) should call for a major shift of funding. We urgently need to re-train our animal farmers in stock-free methods. The Government needs to help struggling stockmen break free into profitable crop farming.

It is vital that the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit consider the whole food chain, and all environmental aspects. For real food security and sustainable land use, the UK needs to move away from eating meat and dairy products.

Firstly, there is a complex interrelationship between arable and grassland, woodland and moorland, etc., that affects the healthy functioning of a range of systems, from hydrological and energy flows to access to the land for recreation and human wellbeing. A holistic view of these is necessary; it is not just about production vs. biodiversity. Although the scenarios described by Michael Pollan in ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ are largely North American, rather than European, they do point to the desirability of rethinking the relationship between arable production for animal feed and the use of grassland and woodland for animal and vegetable food production.

But the land is about more than food production and it is interesting to note that The Netherlands has a designated State Landscape Architect – Dirk Sijmons – to consider such matters. He has some fascinating insights into how, in a country where some parts of the landscape are entirely man-made, a vision for the future might be developed that takes a holistic approach. He has commented on the rise and rise of “horsiculture”, now a predominant land use in many areas, as well as what radical approaches are needed if climate change scenarios and associated changes in water levels are taken seriously in projecting the future for such a watery landscape.

Secondly, I want to underline the importance of children having the opportunity to experience growing food. There is growing research evidence of the importance of access to ‘nature’ for children’s healthy development. More than this, however, if we want future generations to understand both the challenges of food production and the relationship we all have with the environment that nurtures us, then children from an early age should have the opportunity to grow food that they can eat. This is a challenge for schools and housing developers, urban designers and city planners, and not just for farmers and conservationists, but one that we don’t take seriously at present.

Ending animal farming subsidies saves half the EC budget, leaving more for pensions, education and health care which are currently a black hole. Everybody wins! Especially farmers, who cannot survive on dairy and meat farming, but do well on organic fruit and veg, trees (with a subsidy till the first crop) or arable. And don’t tell me you can only grow sheep in Wales and Yorkshire when the next hill is covered with trees. As a vegan I use one fifth as much land for my diet as a meat-eater and half as much as a vegetarian, it’s easy and cheap, and everyone could at least move in that direction.

And let’s not forget that livestock production is responsible for 18% of global warming, more than all transport combined, according to the UN report Livestock’s Long Shadow, but eating less animal food is very easy and a chance for anyone to vote three times a day with your fork for a safer world. Giving up your car is hard for some. Giving up animal products is much easier than you think, but cutting down is very very easy. You cannot possibly consider yourself an environmentalist if you don’t tackle your diet too, so let’s say it. I applaud Hilary Benn for being a vegetarian agriculture minister and hope he’ll help farmers to take farming back to what it used to be, where you didn’t have farmers starving when their farm was quarantined for foot and mouth because they also had potatoes, vegetables and fruit trees on their land. Let’s end the dairy and meat monoculture and give farmers the opportunity to not have to get up at 5am too. Like I said, everybody wins.

Alex Bourke, MSc
Former Chair, the Vegan Society,
Director, Vegetarian Guides Ltd

No matter how clever we are we will never design a bureaucratic system that delivers such complexity or matches local circumstances and local land management. For example, the countryside soon will turn yelow as the winter rape comes into flower. The scale of planting is driven not by local imperatives but a grant scheme that incentivises the same behaviour across wide tracts of countryside.

As a result we create for ourselves a treadmill of criteria, indicators and targets with endless reporting. Despite this effort we seem constantly to be swinging from one perverse, unpredicted outcome to another.

Where I differ with David is that I suspect that the huge scale of global markets might encourage exactly the same behaviour, so some kind of checks and balances is needed, and outcomes as well as process do need to be considered. I think that one of the problems has been that not only have we been outcome-focused, we have also been too prescriptive about how outcomes should be achieved.

However, all this is based on a mindset that sees agricultural production and farming as the basis of economic land use. There are other economic uses of land, some prouction-based and some service based that should be a greater part of the mix.

Again, society has appropriated a lot of the non-agricultural outputs from land. Water in particular is a valuable product produced by landowners for which they get no compensation and thus have little incentive to manage for quality or quantity of water. The right to roam is an appropriation of a landowner’s right to charge for access – I think it is fine but let’s acknowledge what we have done. High-quality designated landscapes are maintained by constraining land use; the economic beneficiaries are not the landownrs but the shops, hotels and so on. Little of the money flows back into the land-based sector. So landowners are backed into a corner where the only cash-raising option open to them is a fairly narrow range of production-based activities. This applies equally to forestry, my profession, as to agriculture. It is impossible for a forest owner to capture as cash the social value that he or she generates through habitat creation, access, landscape quality and public engagement. In many cases these are real overheads that have to be borne in order to generate a very small amount of cash that can be spent on management and reinvestment.

So actually there isn’t a true market option, because most of the choices that this would imply are unavailable to a landowner. But we do need to widen the choices available because our current practice is really damaging the diversity, beauty and inherent value of our rural land.

The glorious panoply of countryside and habitat types across the UK, and the biodiversities within them, were shaped, if not made, by food production and other land uses over many centuries. It is really important to remember that the nature/environment produced was not done so intentionally. It was the outcome of farmers and land managers applying then current technologies/techniques in pursuit of profit. It is only in the last half century or so that this highly fortunate and beneficial process has gone into reverse, with production systems unraveling what previous systems produced.

Historically this can be a short blip. We now need to enter a new era , or ‘paradigm’, where we seek to deliberately co-produce food and environment (and all the other needs that others point to – socio-economic benefits, energy etc. etc), set of course in global and regional contexts. Surely we are smart enough to do that if it has already happened before by happy accident! As Neil Ward again says, we need to be imaginative. Some food producers and some nature conservation bodies are showing signs of just that – setting up systems which produce food, profit and biodiversity all at once. How about that!!! And there is some evidence that the food produced has some valuable characteristics in comparison to food produced in more ‘conventional’ systems. This was the thrust of the RELU ‘Eating Biodiversity …’ project led by professor Henry Buller where social scientists, ecologists and food scientists looked at what we termed ‘win, win, win’ innovative best practice in the co-production of food, nature and socio-economic value for producers and consumers. There is much to be done in scientific and policy terms to usher in the new era of planned co-production. Let’s get on with it.

The minerals industry is principally controlled through Mineral Policy Statements (MPS) numbers 1 (Planning and Minerals), and MPS 2 (Controlling and Mitigating the Environmental Effects of Minerals Extraction in England). Much of today’s policy on biodiversity and land-use emanates from Agenda 21 of the Earth Summit, following which our government produced the national Biodiversity Action Plan based on chapter 15 (Conservation of Biological Diversity). Chapter 14 (Promoting Sustainable Agriculture And Rural Development), advocates policies to ensure food security and the necessity of feeding an expanding world population from existing high grade agricultural land, thus avoiding damage to eco-systems by producing food on marginal lands. Accordingly in 1996 the Government issued Mineral Planning Guideline 7 (MPG7), (Reclamation of Mineral Workings) which repeated the advice on high grade land by advising clearly that where minerals underlie the best and most versatile agricultural land then the site should be restored to at least a potential for agricultural production at least as good as before.

Strong, sound, clear advice on quarry restorations or ‘after-use strategies’ is apparently still needed where minerals underlie productive land. Mark Avery is right, we can’t take agriculture in isolation, but if agriculture is responsible for much environmental degradation (largely due to policy), then that industry should have the capability of improving the environment. There is much talk of biodiversity which in many conjures pictures of endangered and rare species, but if that picture continues to gain currency then we are in danger of making mistakes. Biodiversity is every living thing including humans and the crops they grow – look after the common species and the rare ones will find a niche. Studies conducted over many years demonstrate that well-managed organic, mixed and purely arable farming can result in yields as high as conventional farming, with no nutrient runoff, can meet BAP targets and be a net sink of CO2. Not only that, but restored quarry sites could be an ideal opportunity to provide for food security, local employment and retention of skills; it safeguards landscape, and reduces food miles etc.

Further research and events demonstrate the aptness of Agenda 21’s advice on sustainable land-use and biodiversity, but we have a problem in Planning Policy Statement7, (Sustainable Development in Rural Areas), which says that it’s up to the Planning Authority, after taking ‘competent’ advice, to decide whether or not higher grade land can be taken, but, in the case of mineral extraction here, the competent advice (which would even have embarrassed Sir Humphrey) was as follows: ‘You asked why I referred to Planning Policy Statement (PPS) 7 rather than to Mineral Planning Guidance (MPG) 7 in my response to the local planning authority (LPA) on behalf of Defra. The reason is because PPS 7 sets out Government policy on the protection of “best and most versatile” (BMV) agricultural land, whilst MPG 7 provides guidance on the restoration of mineral workings. As the majority of the land subject to the above planning application is BMV and is not to be returned to agriculture, it is appropriate to consider the proposals against PPS 7 paragraphs 28 and 29. The comments set out in my response on behalf of Defra also address the issues relating to the restoration of the land and
sustainable use of soil resources’.

I asked when last Defra had objected to the loss of BMV land and on 23 July 2007 they responded ‘Although Defra is a statutory consultee on planning applications relating to developments affecting more than 20 hectares of ‘best and most versatile’ (BMV) agricultural land , such cases are dealt with on our behalf by the regional Government Offices. In the light of your enquiry we have consulted colleagues, at each of these. The last objection to a planning application because of the loss of BMV land was made by the Government Office for the South West in November 2005. The application was for residential development on a site not identified in the local Plan’.

This forum is supposed to be a public consultation, the RSPB and the CPRE are deemed important in this debate, but regarding Mineral extraction nationally, the RSPB has clearly made up its mind that agricultural land is not a consideration. Since the mid 90’s strategies and policies are being worked up and being put in place advising that quarry restoration, for the benefit of nature conservation – to meet Biodiversity Action Plan targets – is a more beneficial after-use than a restoration to food production or at least a potential for it and Planners are taken in by the short-sightedness of the policy. In its recent publication ‘Nature After Minerals’ where it refers to the Earth Summits advice on biodiversity – the advice shown above – it fails to take into account the advice on higher grade land and the increasingly alarming synergistic effects of taking it permanently out of production. It says that since Mineral Planning Guidance 7, was published in 1996 that ‘knowledge, techniques and demands for different land-uses have changed, and much of the document is no longer fit for purpose’.

I wrote to the RSPB Minerals Unit and after outlining my concerns that the destruction of BMV land necessarily defeats the RSPB’s objectives, I asked ‘what is the RSPB’s view on the permanent destruction of BMV land?’ I received the ambiguous reply that ‘As a nature conservation organisation, our priority is to defend land that is of high biodiversity value (irrespective of whether it is BMV land), and to encourage (quarry) restoration that maximises biodiversity gains’.
After pointing out that my question had been sidestepped I received the comment that ‘Just to clarify that the Nature After Minerals Programme is a partnership between the RSPB and Natural England. Your letter posed the questions to the RSPB, and so the answers are from that organisation only’.

In the Swale /Ure catchment the CPRE is advocating ‘Taking as an example the Norfolk Broads we can see how a totally man made quarried landscape can be at least as attractive as the one that preceded it. We should seek to ensure that the landscape we are creating should be at valuable as the one we are destroying’. They promote nature reserves at least 240 hectares with reed beds, sailing and getting rid of roads and buildings that are in the way, yet completely disregarding invaluable BMV land and a unique historic landscape of international significance.

The current debate on bio-fuels highlights the effect of taking land out of production, thus bringing bio-diverse marginal land, including rain forest, into food production, with a concomitant rise in CO2, but (certainly in North Yorkshire) planners and developers use the pretext of bio-diversity gains to justify the destruction of farmland habitat and archaeology; the landscapes character – to do exactly what they have done for years – dig out the mineral leaving behind pit lakes, hide them behind dense linear planting – and call it nature conservation.

Joined up thinking on opencast quarrying is required, unfettered by such considerations as cronyism, unnaturally close relationships between planners and vested interests, and pre-determining policies and decisions by cherry-picking from diverse policies and strategies to ensure the desired result.