Some initial thoughts on a post-CAP farm subsidy system

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Miles King

Well that was a bit of a shock. In the absence of exit polls I was looking at what the betting markets were doing – all the money seemed to be piling in on shortening odds for Remain. The Bookies will have done well out of yesterday’s result.

For the moment, I will focus on farm subsidies as this is a huge change – the biggest change as far as nature in Britain is concerned. I have written previously on a number of occasions critiquing the sort of things that the Leave side have been saying, about what a post-Brexit farm subsidy system would look like. Now we will have the chance to find out whether anything they claimed will actually happen.

What would a farm subsidy system look like that would really help nature? Firstly, the idea that landowners receive a subsidy just for owning farm land (artfully attacked by George Monbiot yesterday) must go.

Payments should only be made where direct public benefits are created. Food production per se is not a public benefit, at the farm level. This is simply because the farmer can sell the food to whoever they wish, and that means it may end up in China, not here. Public benefits would include preventative measures such as protecting high value nature where it still occurs on farmland (those precious few places), reducing or eliminating the pollution of rivers and the sea by farm effluent and pesticides, conserving soils (and their carbon) improving animal welfare etc; and positive measures such as creating new wildlife habitats (including rewilding), encouraging people to come to farms to experience nature etc.

Regulation is absolutely essential to underpin the payments system. Growing crops like Maize near to rivers should just be banned. I have previously suggested a “polluter pays” approach for environmentally damaging crops, so farmers would have to pay extra if they wanted to grow them, this money being used to directly ameliorate the impacts they have on the environment. I think it would be worth looking at. Farmers hated the CAP-drive cross compliance process, and yet it was mostly toothless. But it’s inevitable that there will need to be a system to check that any money spent on farm subsidies  is spent on public benefits, so this is an opportunity to design one that is not onerous on farmers, and also works as far as checking compliance goes.

The system needs to recognise that landscape features on farms are already delivering public benefit and deserve support, as opposed to the crazy system that the EC had adopted of mapping out every single tiny “ineligible feature”, forcing farmers to destroy scrub, hedgerows and ponds, in order to claim subsidy. I’d turn the whole thing on its head and start by recognising that farmers who have lots of landscape features receive a payment for maintaining them.

There’s a great danger that production subsidies will return, particularly headage payments in the uplands. This would be a disaster and all calls must be resisted.Without CAP subsidies many upland farms will be simply uneconomic. If sheep farmers left the hills, what would happen? The ensuing vacuum might draw in large scale afforestation, for example. This would be good if it was a mix of trees which benefitted nature, but obviously not if it was just serried rank of conifers. So lobbying is needed to make sure it’s the former rather than the latter. And we are not living in the 1950s, the Forestry Commission is a very different beast and I think it highly unlikely that they would support a return to mass conifer afforestation of the hills.

There will also be calls for “payments for ecosystem services”, using a natural capital approach, where every item is costed on some spurious basis – £25 for bee habitat, £50 to store floodwater. This should also be resisted. Farmers do deserve public support where they deliver public benefit, but area payments are the best and simplest approach to providing that support. The most public benefit (eg if land is recognised as having high value for nature – as an SSSI) should be paid the highest amount.

What about agri-environment schemes? Bearing in mind it’s inevitable that there will be much less money available for farm support, any funding directed to agri-environment schemes will need to be spent very carefully. Obviously funding is needed to support the management of high nature value sites like SSSIs and other valuable sites, many of which need restoration. Creating new habitat should be supported to:

  • Expanding an existing small area with high value for nature, for example to increase the chances of a threatened species surviving, or to make management more economically viable (eg creating new areas of meadow around an existing fragment)
  • Supporting landscape-scale restoration in areas where nature is still found at the landscape-scale. Further support for Nature Improvement Areas would do this.
  • Support for creating habitats near urban areas to enable people to visit and experience nature near where they live (ideally in walking or cycling distance).
  • Support for large new near-rewilding or rewilding projects, such as Ennerdale or Knepp.

In truth though I think the pot of money for agri-environment will be small. Other sources of funding may well be needed.

I may return to other issues later, but I may just go for a very long walk.

Posted in Brexit, Common Agricultural Policy, farm subsidies | Tagged , , | 19 Comments

Guest Blog by Ian Hepburn: Nature and the environment: what happens if we vote ourselves out of the EU?

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Miles King

If the UK votes tomorrow to leave the European Union, giving a clear run for the ‘Vote Leave’ politicians, elite supporters and advisors to flex their muscles in the corridors of power, how will that affect our wildlife in the future?

Until recently, we’ve had rather few clues to work on from the ‘Vote Leave’ camp. But in the last couple of weeks or so the mask of apparent disinterest in the environment has slipped. The gloves are off and the heavyweights are keen to express their contempt for the EU’s record on environmental protection, with a clear belief and stated intent to go it alone in safeguarding British wildlife and our natural environment.

First, at the end of May, we had some opinions offered to The Guardian by the Rt. Hon. George Eustice, MP for a sizeable chunk of Cornwall –the Camborne & Redruth constituency– currently Minister of State for Farming, Food and the Marine Environment (and earlier in his political career a wannabe UKIP member of the European Parliament). Mr Eustice claims that we shouldn’t worry about wildlife. The article quotes his views that “The UK could develop a more flexible approach to environmental protection free of “spirit-crushing” Brussels directives if it votes to leave the EU …” and “If we had more flexibility, we could focus our scientists’ energies on coming up with new, interesting ways to protect the environment …”. I’m sure that the capacity of the British scientific community would indeed be up to the task. But would the Treasury really provide the resources for such activity, and would politicians be inclined to put the necessary legislation in place? This would rather buck the trend of the UK Governments’ track record over recent decades in respect of environmental legislation backed by ‘hard law’. For example, the UK was dismissive of the Habitats Directive when it was first proposed back in 1988, drafted by Stanley Johnson then working in the European Commission; the UK remained unenthusiastic during the negotiations of the final text of the directive which was eventually adopted unanimously by all Member States in 1992. Since then, the UK has been obliged through a series of actions in the European Union Court of Justice (EUCJ), promoted largely by environmental NGOs, to implement the Habitats Directive properly and effectively. Miles King’s blog looks at Mr Eustice’s comments in more detail.

A further kick in the teeth for wildlife came from the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign a few days later. Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of ‘Vote Leave Limited’, founder of the eurosceptic Business for Britain, joined in to mock and criticise the relatively small sums of EU money spent to co-finance actions to safeguard threatened wildlife (with the remaining funding coming largely from wildlife and other charities). The Sunday Telegraph on June 5th reports on the Vote Leave campaign chief executive’s views of an innovative ‘Little Tern Recovery Project’, a multi-partner initiative across 20 sites in Britain: “Matthew Elliott … of the Vote Leave campaign, joked that the idea is ‘one for the birds’. He said: ‘If you asked most people whether they’d rather spend money on aphrodisiacs for birds [or] the NHS I think I know what they would choose… If we vote to leave on 23 June we’ll be able to spend our money on our priorities again’.” The EU fund which supports the project is miniscule in comparison with the both the overall EU budget and the UK’s national health budget. Is Mr Elliott really suggesting that the competition for funds is so binary that it’s either NHS or wildlife? That’s simply ridiculous and seems to be clutching at straws to shore up a Vote Leave belief that everything ‘saved’ by leaving the EU will be diverted into social and community services like the NHS. What preposterous nonsense!

And then the Rt. Hon. Owen Paterson, MP for North Shropshire, ex-Secretary of State for the Environment who in 2014 formed and currently chairs the right-of-centre think-tank ‘UK 2020’ wades in. In a speech to his own organisation on June 8th Mr Paterson bent his considerable intellect to attack on EU environmental policy and laws, re-inventing history along the way. I’m not sure how long it took to deliver the 4,000 word speech under the abbreviated title ‘A Greener Future Outside the EU’. It would take about the same space to rebut properly, so let’s focus on one element: the notion that the Council of Europe’s Bern Convention is better than the nature directives at protecting UK wildlife. This is utter rubbish. The EU Birds Directive and the Bern Convention were both adopted in 1979; the first came into force in 1981; the second in 1982. So two legal instruments delivering ‘European level’ bird protection came off the grid at more or less the same time with the UK’s 1981 Wildlife & Countryside Act giving effect to both. The key difference is that the Birds Directive requires an effective network of protected areas (Special Protection Areas, SPAs) to be established across the member states; the Bern Convention doesn’t have this provision. The Birds Directive is also backed by the European Union Court of Justice (EUCJ); the Bern Convention, while “a binding international legal instrument” has no such judicial support. So half a decade on, and the protection of birds, including the SPA network, is making substantial progress, with help from emerging EUCJ case law obliging EU member states –including the UK–to be more effective than they might otherwise be inclined. In contrast, the protection of other wildlife and habitats –in principle covered by the Bern Convention– is not doing so well. ‘Civil society’ in the form of British NGOs make it their business to get wildlife habitats and non-bird species on the same legal footing as birds, and in the mid-1980s the fight for what we now know as the ‘Habitats Directive’ begins. There’s no cosy partnership between UK government and civil society anywhere to be found. We know that the Birds Directive has been effective, in the UK and across the rest of Europe – not perfect, but threatened European species are doing far better within the EU than in countries outside the EU. Rigorous analysis has demonstrated this. It’s too early to perform the same test on the outcomes from the Habitats Directive, but the evidence points in that direction. The UK might have been in the lead with other governments in establishing the Bern Convention. But I’d rather have effective EU legislation to protect UK wildlife than rely on an unenforceable multilateral environmental agreement with no teeth, and at the whim of UK governments.

The Vote Leave campaign and the leading promoters of UK out of the EU really don’t care about the environment, and care even less for protecting nature and wildlife. So in my view, a vote to leave the EU will send nature conservation back into the dark ages.

Posted in Brexit, EU referendum | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

A vote for Brexit is an attack on public spending and the public sector

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Miles King

Once again today we hear pro-Brexit ministers claim that all the things that are funded via the EU will continue to be supported, from the Treasury. So, according to Farm minister Eustice, things like farm subsidies will stay the same (or get bigger) alongside support for UK scientific research, social action and so on.

The Brexiteers are claiming that there is a £8Bn annual “dividend” for leaving the EU – and that there is enough money to give the NHS an extra £100M a week in funding.

But an excellent piece of research by Desmog UK this week, has revealed that there is a very small Nexus of people actually running the Brexit campaign, or influential behind the scenes. They are all hard-line neoliberal or neolibertarian ideologues, and they are also all climate sceptics or deniers.

They believe that the state is fundamentally a bad thing and should either be abolished, or kept very small and out of people’s lives. The names in the Nexus will be familiar to regular readers of this blog: Viscount Matt Ridley, his brother in law former Secretary of State for the Environment Owen Paterson, Global Warming Policy Foundation chair Lord Nigel Lawson, neoliberal thinktank funders Nigel Vinson and Michael Hintze, former Tax Payers Alliance CEO Matthew Elliott, former Conservative Home editor Tim Montgomerie, outspoken Tory MEP Dan Hannan, you get the gist. Strangely, all of their organisations are based in the same building – 55 Tufton Street, in the back streets of Westminster.

The idea that these people would want to continue to maintain the level of public expenditure channelled through the EU, after a Brexit vote, is laughable. It’s not even laughable, it’s absurdly risible. This group of influential people want to reduce public expenditure on anything, as far as possible, ideally to zero.  As far as they are concerned, anything currently funded by public expenditure, should be replaced by a market-driven private-sector approach, driven by the search for profit. This is what neoliberalism means.

This group represent a tiny proportion of the UK population, and they have an extreme ideological agenda, which they plan to force onto the rest of us. Indeed, they and their fellow travellers have been gradually imposing their ideology on us for the past 30 years. That imposition has accelerated since 2010 and accelerated further again since 2015.

Figures from the respected Royal Society show that the UK paid in €78Bn between 2007-2013 and received €48Bn back over that period. For scientific research, the UK paid in €5.4Bn and received €8.8Bn back. Which means that being in the EU has helped the UK to build its scientific research and development industry substantially. Some of this funding went to climate change-related research.

Anyone who is taken in by the idea that somehow the public funding which the UK receives via the EU – for research into climate change for example – will continue after Brexit, is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Let’s be perfectly clear. This UK Government has been and continues to dismantle the public sector in the name of ideology. With a vote for Brexit, this dismantlement project will be given a massive steroid injection.

Is this really what you want?

 

Posted in Brexit, climate change, neoliberalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Guest blog from Sandra Bell at Friends of the Earth: Govt considering scrapping ban on Neonicotinoids

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Miles King

I’m reblogging this post from Sandra Bell at Friends of the Earth. The NFU are trying to overturn the ban on neonicotinoids, and the regulatory group is considering their proposal today.

7 reasons why the Government must not allow bee-harming pesticides back on our farms

Sandra Bell

13 June 2016

Bright yellow oilseed rape flowers are buzzing with bees but in some fields the bees may get a dose of banned bee-harming insecticide as they feed because of decisions made last year.

And any day now the Government is about to decide whether to allow neonicotinoids back on our farms again this year.

Tell the Environment Secretary to protect our bees

Three neonicotinoids pesticides have been banned from use on flowering crops by the European Commission because they are harmful to bees.  But last year the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), backed by pesticide companies, persuaded the Government to let farmers use them on oilseed rape crops in four English counties.  In those counties crops grown from pesticide laced seeds are flowering in the fields now.

Soon farmers will be ordering their seeds to plant this autumn.  And the NFU, backed by the pesticide companies, is again asking the Government to allow farmers to plant oilseed rape seeds coated in bee-harming neonicotinoids. We can’t tell you which counties are included, or the evidence being considered, because the documents are being kept secret from the public and even MPs.

The health of our bees is important to all of us.  It’s unacceptable for decisions affecting them to be taken in the dark.  That’s why we have published our evidence to the Government at the bottom of this blog.

Seven reasons why the Government should say No to the NFU

  1. We can’t afford to gamble with our bees.  We have an amazing 267 species of bees in the UK, the honey bee is just one species and our wild bees – solitary and bumblebees – pollinate more of our crops.
  2. The evidence keeps mounting up with more and more independent scientific studies showing that neonicotinoids have negative impacts on bees.  For example, a study in Sweden found that neonicotinoid treated seeds in real field conditions had negative effects on wild bees.
  1. Crops have done fine without neonics.  The average UK oilseed rape yield actually increased by 6.9% last harvest (the first without access to neonics) showing that the NFU’s predictions of widespread crop damage have been unfounded. And this figure already accounts for any fields lost to pest damage.
  2. There are better, more bee friendly ways to protect crops. Research for Friends of the Earth found that there are effective non-chemical ways of controlling pests in oilseed rape.These include encouraging beneficial insects – the bugs that will eat crop pests for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Measures to entice these farmer’s friends include planting wildflower strips and hedgerows – which will also boost nature on our farmland.  Ploughing fields less and sowing seeds earlier have been also shown to help too.  Spraying more with other pesticides will just make matters worse – killing the friendly bugs.
  3. Neonics cannot be contained.  The NFU says that seed treatments are a “targeted” means of applying pesticides.  But the reality is that most of the chemical – over 90% – enters the environment rather than the crop.  That’s not targeted and its deeply worrying because neonicotinoids are turning up in wildflowers and hedgerows planted next to treated arable fields giving bees and other pollinators another dose of these harmful substances.There is also evidence that neonics entering the soil may be harming earthworms – which are essential for healthy soils.
  4. There is little evidence that neonics work well.  The NFU say they are essential to stop crops being destroyed by cabbage stem flea beetle.  In fact research last year showed that where treated seeds had been used as a result of the emergency authorisation crop damage from flea beetles was pretty much the same as in fields where no treatment was used.
  5. Slugs are not just an annoyance to gardeners.  Last year slugs caused as much damage to oilseed rape as cabbage stem flea beetles.  Neonicotinoids do not control slugs and could even be making the problem worse by harming the insects on the farm that feed on slugs.

The NFU seems determined that banned bee harming chemicals will be allowed on our fields.  They’ve asked the Government once already this year and failed, now they are back with another proposal.

We’ve submitted our case against the application and we’re not keeping it a secret. We are happy for our evidence to stand up to public and scientific scrutiny.

Read our report on farming oilseed rape without neonicotinoids.

Read our letter to Prof Ian Boyd, the DEFRA Chief Scientific Advisor.

Read our submission to the Expert Committee on Pesticides, opposing a second application.

The Government’s expert advisers meet on 14th June but it’s the Secretary of State for the Environment Liz Truss that will make the final deicison. 

Please help make sure that Liz Truss does not allow bee harming pesticides back in our fields.

Posted in Friends of the Earth, Neonicotinoids, NFU | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Wood Meadows, Flood Meadows and McMeadows

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Miles King

Last week was a meadows week for me, visiting Hagge Woods, followed by the annual Floodplain Meadows Partnership steering group meeting, in Northamptonshire.

Wood Meadows

Hagge Woods was a 25 acre barley field in 2012. It’s been converted into a meadow using wildflower seed from a commercial seed supplier, supplanted with locally collected seed of other plants (not in the seed mix), which is being grown on and planted out by volunteers.

Or is it a wood? It started out in 2012 as a Diamond Jubilee plantation on the Escrick Park Estate, but then changed direction- to something more interesting. Within the meadow are little sapling of trees which are going to grow on to become much larger shrubs and big trees. Slowly but surely the area which is now meadow will disappear as the trees grow and shade out the meadow flowers. The Hagge Woods Trust, which is running the project, aims for 60% woodland cover and 40% meadow, with the meadow existing in a network of woodland glades and rides. Much hazel has been planted and the plan is that this will be coppiced.

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Hagges Wood Meadows © Miles King

Woodland (and meadow) expert George Peterken, talked to us about Wood Meadows. Wood meadows are an ancient land-use, still found in parts of Scandinavia, and montane areas of Europe. They may well also have existed in the UK. Wood Meadows were, as the name suggests, managed both for hay, and for wood. Meadow areas were cut (and sometimes grazed), while trees were either coppiced or pollarded, to produce tree fodder, firewood and other types of wood product. One advantage of growing trees and meadow together is that the deep roots of the trees draw up water and nutrients from deep within the soil, which are delivered to the meadow through leaf fall. Historically, leaves were raked up, burnt and the ash scattered across the meadow, to restore fertility removed in the hay.

Tree Fodder? Yes, for millennia, trees were managed to produce winter fodder for animals. And of course places with very long winters, where animals needed to be kept alive, such as in Scandinavia, mountainous areas of Europe, or indeed the UK, tree fodder was an important part of the farming system. Holly was a particularly important source of tree fodder, and places where holly’s were pollarded to produce such material, were called hollins. There are still plenty of places in the UK with hollin or holly in the place name. Other trees and shrubs were also used as fodder in the UK and across Europe, including Oak, Ash and Elm. This article explores the history of tree fodder in more detail.

Whether Hagge Woods will truly become a wood meadow (in the historic sense) or not doesn’t really matter. Neither meadow hay nor coppice wood have any significant economic value within our current agricultural system – though they certainly do elsewhere in Europe where High Nature Value farming is still alive, no thanks to the Common Agricultural Policy. What I think makes wood meadows interesting is that they provide opportunities for people to experience a wide variety of nature in a relatively small place.

Imagine changing an urban park where all the grass is kept short and all the trees are managed either as large standards or as “lollipops”, into an urban wood meadow.  There would be areas of short grass, long grass meadows, shrubs that are kept small, coppiced trees, pollarded trees. There would be, just like with Hagge Woods, opportunities for the local community to get involved with the management of the park, planting out flowers to enrich the amenity grass swards, hay-making, and winter tree management. I’m not suggesting that football pitches or dog-walking areas should all be converted to wood meadow. Of course amenity areas maintained as such as essential, but at the moment far too much public land is maintained unthinkingly.

Floodplain Meadows

As I have written before, the Floodplain Meadows Partnership is to my mind one of the best conservation initiatives in the UK. It is a true partnership, where everyone who is involved, leaves their organisation’s agendas outside the door, and works together to achieve a future for these fabulous meadows. Floodplain meadows are very ancient, dating back to at least Roman times. It’s worth thinking about this for a minute. The typical wildflower meadow, the dry type which has declined so dramatically over the last 100 years, is a very different beast.

Dry meadows have come and gone with the changing needs of farming – I wrote about this in Nature’s Tapestry. Witness how many surviving meadows are to be found on ridge and furrow – a reminder that they were cultivated in the past.

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ridge and furrow wildflower meadows © Miles King

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course it appears that dry wildflower meadows are unlikely to make another comeback, given the shift from horsepower to fossil fuels, but who can tell?

Floodplain meadows, where they have survived, have quite a different character to dryer meadows. Although they are managed in the same way, with hay cut followed by aftermath grazing, the conditions  – especially the way that the ground water under the meadow behaves, mean that a quite different group of plants occur in them. You can read much more about these plant communities in the excellent Floodplain Meadows Technical Handbook. Each floodplain meadow is subtly different from the other, given the complex interplay between geology, hydrology, soil development and management history.  We were lucky enough to visit an exceptional floodplain meadow in Northamptonshire, Achurch Meadow. The sheer variety of different plant communities there, and the way they smoothly graded one to another, was a sight to behold. I have certainly not seen a meadow which supported the two native Sanguisorba’s (Great Burnet, Salad Burnet) and the two native Filipendula’s (Dropwort and Meadowsweet) all growing together, before. Meadow Saxifrage was also plentiful.

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Meadow Saxifrage © Miles King

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazingly, this particular meadow had not been given the status of Special Area of Conservation under the EU Habitats Directive. Fortunately the landowner is proud to have such an extraordinary area for nature on his land, and it is designated an SSSI.

We met another farmer who was also immensely proud to have flood meadow on his land, and was busy restoring several fields which had been agriculturally improved, back to flood meadow or similar habitats. He was pleased to welcome the floodplain meadows group to his farm, though he had to disappear to help his neighbour round up some frisky steers which had got out. One thing really stuck in my memory: he explained to us how he liked to go down into the wet end of the flood meadow by the river, where the cattle would lie in the morning. He would stop the quad bike and just sit with them. They were happy because they were in a place they liked (the meadow) and he explained that their contentment created an aura, which he could physically feel. Experiencing their aura took all his troubles away and have him a sense of peace that he could not find anywhere else.

This is not the sort of thing you usually hear from a farmer; farmers are very practical people, not prone to sentiment at all. And indeed what he was describing was not sentiment, but a visceral connection to nature. I said to one of my colleages, that we need to clone him!

MacMeadows

I will finish today with another meadow related story. Plantlife has been stirring up something of  a hornet’s nest, resulting from a blog they published in the use of wildflower seed in meadow creation “keeping the wild in wildflower meadows”.

In the blog Plantlife criticized the use of wildflower meadow seed for creating wildflower meadows, especially creating identikit meadows, or MacMeadows as they termed it. Plantlife suggested that wildflower seed suppliers were not supplying seed of native plants, or were supplying “generic” seed mixes with the same set of a few plant species used everywhere. Oxeye daisy was singled out for attention  – it was ironic that, at one of the floodplain meadow restoration projects we visited in Northamptonshire, the farmer was rather sad that the seeding had not been particularly successful, as he was hoping to see have seen stripes of Oxeye daisy appearing in his meadow.

It’s not surprising that this has gone down like a lead balloon with the wildflower seed industry. Godfather of the quality wildflower seed suppliers, Donald MacIntyre of Emorsgate Seeds, took particular umbrage (see his comment below the Plantlife blog); given his surname this is hardly surprising and it was insensitive for Plantlife not to have considered this before coining the phrase. Nick Mann from Habitat Aid also responded on his own blog, complaining that Plantlife were tarring all wildflower seed suppliers with the same “generic” brush.

I understand Flora Locale are also unimpressed, given that they have been campaigning on this issue for nearly 20 years and didn’t even get a name check in the blog. Flora Locale worked with Plantlife to produce a position statement on habitat creation (and use of wildflower seed) which many organisations signed. And looking back to 1994, when Plantlife published “Seeds of Destruction” and, for the first time, really highlighted the problem, it’s fair to say that a great deal of progress has been made.

This is, to an extent, an example of “not making the best the enemy of the good.” It’s good that wildflowers are being sown in places where they were otherwise missing – Hagge Woods is a great example of this. It’s unrealistic to expect meadows to spring, fully formed, from the ground of arable fields. They don’t. Meadow plants do not tend to have long seed banks, relying on individual plants to live short lives and reproduce abundantly (eg yellow rattle) or live for a long time and reproduce occasionally (eg Great burnet). Meadow plants also “hitched a ride” from one place to another in the past, through the movement of animals, and the movement of hay, around the country, or even between countries.

We shouldn’t get hung up on the idea that meadows are particularly “natural”. They are a wonderful creation arising from the interplay between human activity and nature. They were created for a specific reason, to produce hay and grazing for animals. That purpose has now (mostly) gone, and if we want them to survive, beyond a few treasured relicts, then we need to find a new purpose for them. That purpose could well be to bring joy and an experience of nature into people’s lives.

 

Posted in floodplain meadows partnership, Hagge Woods, wildflower seed | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Parliament calls for ban on double subsidy for biogas #Maize.

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Miles King

 

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Maize is in the news again, especially Maize specifically grown to power Anaerobic Digesters to produce biogas.

In response to at least two years of calls for reform to the biogas subsidy regime,  last week the Government finally launched a consultation on reducing or removing the subsidy paid to grow Maize for biogas production.

This is something I have been writing about for quite some time now, and you can read my posts about it ad nauseam.

Through the consultation, the Government recognises, for the first time (I believe) that biogas from Maize has a higher carbon footprint than other sources, though it is typically underplayed:

AD installations that use crops tend instead to be at the more expensive end of the carbon cost effectiveness range.

DECC is proposing that the subsidy paid to biogas producers that use maize is either halved or stopped altogether. But their proposal is that this change will only apply to new plants, not existing ones.

The consultation also fails to mention the enormous environmental cost of growing Maize.

phil brewin maize tweet

Phil Brewin, Somerset Levels hydrologist, posted this photo on twitter earlier this week, showing the ditches running through Currymoor SSSI running red with sediment. This is due to the ground being prepared to grow Maize – and Maize is being grown on the peaty soils of the Levels as well as the surrounding hills. The Carbon Footprint of Maize grown on peat soils would probably break the Carbon Footprint meter.

Soil erosion, causing downstream flooding is a critical issue. As is the loss of soil for growing food, storing carbon and generally supporting life on the planet. Today, the Environmental Audit Committee published its report into soil  health .

I’m delighted that they covered the biogas Maize issue. Here are some excerpts:

Subsidies for maize for anaerobic digestion

1. In addition to concerns about the effectiveness of CAP subsidy monitoring, we have also heard evidence that some public subsidies encourage practices which damage soil health. Chief among these is the growth of maize for anaerobic digestion. The Soil Association said that maize is “probably the most rapidly expending crop in the UK”, with an increase in area from 8,000 hectares in 1973 to 186,000 at present. Between 2008 and 2014 the area increased by 20%.137 Around 20% of maize is used as an energy crop for anaerobic digestors (AD) that are used to produce energy. Maize can be grown to meet ‘greening’ requirements, and is subsidised under the Common Agricultural Policy.138 It then receives a second subsidy through renewable energy initiatives. The Soil Association estimates that AD plants receive £50m in subsidies each year.139

2. Maize production can increase soil erosion. David Powlson (Rothamsted Research) told us:

Any time that you have soil that is bare with nothing growing on it between crops, or big spaces between the plants, like in the situation of maize, all of those factors are likely to increase the likelihood of erosion, particularly under climate change where it is expected that there are likely to be rather more extreme events, such as rainfall.

David Thompson (Committee on Climate Change) noted that not all of the growth in maize production is accounted for by AD. He also offered further evidence of the effects of maize:
There was a study in the south-west of England that showed that in three-quarters of fields under maize, the soil was so damaged that the rain is unable to penetrate, so the water just runs straight off into rivers, into water courses.141
1. CLA told us that while “maize production can lead to soil and nutrient losses at harvest and during winter,” there are strategies for mitigating this:

Using early maturing varieties, sowing as early as possible, and planting under plastic can reduce the risk of harvesting in poor conditions later in the year.

Certain management practices can also significantly reduce water, nutrient and sediment runoff during winter. Chisel ploughing, under-sowing and cover-cropping can reduce runoff compared with leaving maize stubble untouched.142
1. The National Trust suggested that we need to move to a “situation where crops that present a high risk of damage to soils are not grown in places where soils are vulnerable (e.g. maize should only be grown in low risk locations)”.143

2. The Soil Association described maize for AD as a threat to food production, saying that the area of farmland projected for new maize crops for AD in the UK “would be sufficient to produce 2 billion loaves of wholemeal bread.”144 Peter Melchett (Soil Association) told the Committee that while AD production makes sense if (for example) slurry is used, it does not make sense to subsidise maize for this purpose:

[T]he subsidies that are given to AD production, do not, up until now, distinguish between the source of the fuel that is put into the AD unit. An AD unit taking slurry from cattle or pig waste or chicken waste and turning it into gas and a fertiliser is a sensible use of the technology. Growing hundreds of acres of maize or sugar beet with huge inputs of fertiliser and pesticides, which is then subsidised from the public purse to the farmer putting it into an AD unit, which is subsidised from the public purse to the AD operator, makes no sense.”

1. Rory Stewart, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at Defra, accepted that “maize planted incorrectly, harvested at the wrong time of year or in the wrong climatic conditions can contribute to soil erosion.” He also emphasised that some consequences of poor land management related to maize can trigger breaches of cross compliance:

“If your maize processes are contributing to soil erosion, that is in breach of your cross-compliance regulations and the RPA can then fine you for doing that.”
However he claimed that the subsidy policy was outside his responsibility:

“That is really an issue for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It is predominantly about energy policy, renewable energy policy and the different types of renewable energy policy, but we certainly within the Department are looking closely from our point of view at the costs and benefits of that kind of activity.”

In relation to this apparent clash of policy priorities between Government departments, we heard evidence that the Welsh devolved administration is making efforts to ‘join-up’ soils policy between Government departments. As part of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, soil quality is included as a key indicator alongside healthy life expectancy, water quality and air quality.

Prof Dave Chadwick explained the benefits of this:

“[T]here is more integration of the mainstream of soil within the different departments, so you are not just thinking of soil as just one thing in isolation. It is the realisation that soil is pivotal in the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. [ … ] That multipurpose approach obviously gives good cost benefit, cost effectiveness. It brings the different departments together and—really importantly—it allows you to start to see where any win/wins might be or where any undesirable consequences might be.”

Maize production can damage soil health when managed incorrectly, and incentives for anaerobic digestion should be structured to reflect this. The double subsidy for maize produced for anaerobic digestion is counterproductive and has contributed to the increase in land used for maize production (my emphasis). This subsidy regime represents a clear case in which better joined-up thinking across Government is required in order to ensure that soils are managed sustainably. The Government’s ambition to manage all soils sustainably by 2030 cannot be met if Defra does not achieve buy-in from other departments to achieve the ambition.

Renewable energy subsidies for anaerobic digestion should be restructured to avoid harmful unintended consequences. Revisions should either exclude maize from the subsidy altogether or impose strict conditions on subsidised maize production
to avoid practices in high-risk locations which lead to soil damage. The broader cross-compliance regime has not proved sufficient to prevent such damage. Defra and DECC should work together to evaluate the impact of energy policy on soil health across the board. The upcoming 25-year environment plan should include specific plans for inter-departmental working and structures of accountability with the goal that soil protection is not simply the responsibility of Defra, but rather is a factor against which any policy can be measured.

Recommendations

1. The cross-compliance rules which regulate agricultural soil health must be revised with greater scope, force and ambition. Currently the rules do not cover some important aspects of soil health, are accompanied by a minimal inspection regime, and focus only on preventing further damage to soil rather than restoring and improving soil health. The double subsidy for maize for anaerobic digestion is counterproductive to managing soil sustainably and should be withdrawn (my emphasis)

(thanks to Dave Dunlop at Lancashire Wildlife Trust for pointing me to these particular paragraphs).

This is absolutely right –  Cross Compliance rules governing what sort of activities farm subsidies are paid to support, are widely flouted, and rarely enforced.

Meanwhile, Maize for biogas continues to spread across the countryside.

This year, Maize growers around the Poundbury Biogas plant have already been busy.

P1040658

Hardy Monument with Maize and Plastic. ©Miles King

The fashion is now to grow it under plastic.

This is a view of the South Dorset Ridgeway, a nationally important landscape (in an Area of  Outstanding Natural Beauty) so important that it is currently receiving support through HLF’s Landscape Partnership Scheme. In the distance is Hardy Monument, sitting on the South Dorset Ridgeway. This maize field is sited on the top of the next ridge north, on the chalk. It can be seen from miles around. Nearby Maiden Castle also now sits within a lansdscape partly clothed in plastic.

If this is something you are concerned about, please write in and respond to the Government’s consultation on changing the subsidy regime for AD plants.

Anaerobic Digestion to produce biogas from food waste, manures and especially from road verge cuttings, is a good idea. Taking land out of food production to grow maize to feed AD plants is crazy. Please help stop this madness.

 

Posted in Anaerobic Digester, biogas, cross compliance, Maize | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

George Eustice clueless on impacts of Brexit on laws protecting UK wildlife

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Miles King

Eustice FFB

Farm Minister, former UKIP parliamentary candidate and Brexiter (Brexiteer? Brexetier?) George Eustice today displayed a continuing failure to have absorbed anything useful during his now considerable time at the Department allegedly for the Environment, Defra.

Speaking to the Guardian he stated that, if the UK left leave the EU “the Birds and Habitats Directives would go”. This is self-evidently true.

But in case anyone was concerned that the protection afforded by the Directives would also be removed, Eustice sought to reassure:

“A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.

“If we had more flexibility, we could focus our scientists’ energies on coming up with new, interesting ways to protect the environment, rather than just producing voluminous documents from Brussels.”

Eustice seems to be implying that the transposing legislation – the Habitat Regulations and all the other regulations and laws originating from EU environmental Directives, would stay in place, even if the UK was no longer subject to EU law. There is just one small problem with this – well actually more than one. The Regulations refer, throughout, to the Directives, generally and specifically. I’m no lawyer, but I would find it difficult to imagine these Regulations being even legal, without the UK being signatory to the Directives.

Here’s an example from The Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2010)

“conservation” has the meaning given by Article 1(a) of the Habitats Directive;

Since the UK would no longer be a signatory to the Habitats Directive, how could we continue to use a definition of “conservation” derived from it? the phrase “Habitats Directive” appears in the Regulations 43 times.

Even if the wording remained the same and we continued to use the definitions created by the Directove, what about enforcement? Failure by government to implement part of an EU Directive would (and often does) trigger legal action ultimately ending in a European Court of Justice decision – and these can mean very big fines for the UK. This would of course no longer apply if Brexit occurred. So where would the buck stop?

As I mentioned previously, the European environmental Directives strength also lies in the case law that has developed around them. Case law that applies across the EU, including here in the UK. Following Brexit, the UK would presumably be no longer subject to this case law, so every subsequent decision taken – say by a Planning Inspector, or a Planning Committee, or a Government Department, would no longer be subject to that case law. Which means that hundreds of individual pieces of statutory guidance will need to be rewritten. Once rewritten the protection afforded by those decisions will also be removed.

For the Birds and Habitats Directives, the main, though not the only, mechanism to pursue the holy grail of “favourable conservation status” for species and habitats listed on the Directives, is to designate, protect and manage Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation. Take away the special protection afforded because they are designated under the birds and habitats directives, and they revert to just being Sites of Special Scientific Interest. They lose a whole tier of protection and also funding for management (through the LIFE programme.)

Unless Eustice is suggesting that those SSSIs which are currently European Sites (SPAs and SACs) will be given additional protection, compared with those SSSIs which are not European Sites, the suggestion that the Habitat Regulations (and other transposing legislation) remain in place and carry on working as before, makes no sense at all.

Eustice suggests that Brexit would give the UK more flexibility over protecting our environment. This is true, but not in the way he is implying.

Taking away the European protections afforded some of the UK’s wildlife, would enable some landowners to take a more flexible approach to protecting it – by not protecting it.

For more information about the implications of Brexit for the environment, see this comprehensive report from IEEP.

Posted in Birds Directive, Brexit, EU referendum, George Eustice, Habitats Directive | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Farm minister George Eustice reveals more of his vision for post-Brexit farm subsidies

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Miles King

Farmers Guardian asked five experts from farming and the environment what they would like to see farm subsidies supporting in 2020, whether the UK stays in the EU or not. Well I say experts, two of them were current or former farm ministers (both farmers) so whether they qualify as experts or not is in the eye of the beholder. Abi Burns from RSPB gave the most sensible response, as you would expect.

George Eustice gave a little more away over and above what we already know.

Eustice confirmed the obvious, that if he had his way a new post-Brexit farm subsidy system would be written by the NFU, stating

“A UK agricultural policy will not be dumped on everyone from on high like the CAP. We will work with farming organisations to develop good policy.”

He continued to peddle the highly dubious claim that farmers would get as much – perhaps more subsidy after Brexit than now, as farmers in Switzerland and Norway do:

“The UK government will continue to give farmers and the environment as much support – or perhaps even more – as they get now.”

Let’s just look at whether a comparison with Switzerland and Norway is appropriate here. The average Swiss farm is 23ha in area (average UK farm 84ha in 2010) and each farm receives an annual subsidy of 65000 swiss francs, or £45000 a year. This works out at £2000 a hectare! This is ten times as  much as farmers in the UK receive from the EU.

Is Eustice really suggesting farmers would receive anything like their Swiss counterparts?

Even wealthy Switzerland is now planning to reduce these gargantuan subsidies – though the last time they tried it, subsidies went up.

What about Norway? While Switzerland’s farmers receive the second highest level of subsidy in the world, Norway’s receive the highest level in the world.

Moving swiftly on…

Eustice argues that outside of the EU the UK Government, and devolved governments, would have far more control over how the money was spent. This is indubitably true – blindingly obvious really. Though we would still be bound by the same WTO rules as the rest of the EU, and that means state aid rules. State aid rules are designed to prevent one country giving its farmers unfair economic advantage over another, by means of unfair subsidies.

Creating an entirely new set of rules to govern how subsidies are spent in the UK may not be a bad idea, it all depends on who sets the rules, how they are administered and whether they are enforced.

Eustice’s vision for UK farm subsidies is that they are spent on

1) Promoting profitable food production eg through the introduction of GM crops and removing regulations which are designed to protect the environment and human health.

2) “Safeguarding the environment while promoting habitats”.

Given Eustice has been in Defra for a few years now, you might think that he would have learnt something about things like the environment and wildlife habitats. So who actually wrote this phrase? The use of the word “while” is particularly odd.

A couple of examples of “while” come to mind:

“I drank a cup of coffee while catching up on my emails”; the two things happened at the same time, but there was no direct causal relationship.

“We must protect jobs in the steel industry while continuing to ensure businesses can make a profit in these difficult time” might have been something Sajid Javid had said had he really cared about the steelworkers of South Wales. This use of the word implies that two things can in theory happen, there may be a causal relationship, but there are challenges that make the likelihood of them happening more difficult.

Eustice’s proposal suggests that safeguarding the environment will make promoting habitats less likely, or that they happen at the same time, but are unrelated. Either way it makes little sense. As for “promoting habitats” this is a piece of meaningless jargon – it doesn’t mean that a PR campaign is being launched to tell consumers how wonderful peat bogs are, but rather “promote” means being seen to be encouraging without actually doing anything.

3) improving animal welfare.

Eustice has repeatedly stated that he wants farmers to be paid extra for higher animal welfare standards. But the UK is rightly proud of its relatively high animal welfare standards (at least compared to much of the EU). So this remains a proposal without any detail.

On area payments, Eustice is now talking about making part of the payment conditional on farmers signing up to an independent farm accreditation scheme, to deliver “environmentally sensitive farming”. This looks like it is equivalent to privatising the current, much derided, greening element of the basic payment. Interestingly he name-checks The Rivers Trust, alongside LEAF – as possible administrators of such a scheme.

I wasn’t able to find anything from The Rivers Trust in relation to them proposing a farm accreditation scheme – can anyone else enlighten me on this?

Eustice’s idea of farm accreditation was that farmers, having bought into an accreditation scheme (the cheapest one?) would be “automatically rewarded” without any forms being filled in or farm inspections. What sort of accreditation scheme is that? At the very least, the taxpayer (who is funding all this) might expect some monitoring of outcomes – that habitats had been promoted, for example.

While arguing for the abandonment of the two pillar CAP system, Eustice wants to retain a separate pot of money for “stewardship”, “To promote improved wildlife habitats and higher animal welfare standards.”

back to promotion again. Isn’t this just another way of splitting the budget into two strands in the same way that the CAP is split? Eustice wants a simpler broader scheme which also pays for improved animal welfare. That means less money going to the very best quality habitats (promoted or otherwise) and back to the money for old rope approach of the Entry Level Scheme.

On animal welfare Eustice claims that

“We are reaching the limits of what can be achieved for animal welfare through regulation in a competitive global market. However, we can reward farmers for adopting animal welfare systems of production.”

Is he really suggesting that market forces are preventing higher animal welfare standards from being developed in the UK, and that we should pay subsidy if we want to improve them? Surely this would be contravening those State Aid rules I mentioned earlier. In any case it’s a craven submission to the market. Animal welfare and environmental protection have developed in the UK in spite of the market, global or otherwise.

Eustice finishes his thoughts by suggesting that regulations governing farm subsidies  would be simplified   – and goes further.

“We would establish a clear distinction between regulatory requirements which should be a matter for the courts and payments to farmers for the environmental and other benefits they provide. There would be no more automatic fines. In future, agencies like the RPA or Environment Agency would have to take farmers to court and bring a prosecution for serious breaches and there would be far greater use of warnings and improvement notices.”

There we have it. Under a post-brexit farm subsidy system, landowners who break the rules, by for example repeatedly polluting rivers with effluent, or ploughing up old grassland, or leaving maize stubbles overwinter to exacerbate flooding, would not risk having their subsidies cut, but would have to be taken through the courts.

Eustice has pulled back the curtain a little further to reveal his vision for farm subsidies, if the UK votes to leave the EU in less than 4 weeks time.

It’s a vision that anyone who cares for the environment and for low intensity farming, or who wants to see higher animal welfare achieved, should be alarmed by.

Posted in Brexit, EU referendum, George Eustice | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Shared from Ruth Davis’ blog nature and the common good : Five things I’ve learnt during the referendum campaign.

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Miles King

I enjoyed reading this piece from Ruth Davis, formerly of Plantlife, RSPB and Greenpeace, now at E3G. Ruth writes at Nature and the Common Good.  I thought I would share it with you:

1) Project fear is really Project Common Sense. And it will probably work. I have run out of patience with pro-Europeans complaining that the ‘in’ campaign doesn’t ‘make the visionary case for Europe’. I am someone who would indeed respond to passionately pro-European messages. But I am also one of the vanishingly tiny number […]

via Five things I’ve learnt during the referendum campaign. — Nature and the common good

Posted in EU referendum, Europe, ruth davis, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Paper recommendation: power relations in ecosystem services work

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Miles King

The issue of power relationships was touched upon in the Earthwatch Natural Capital Debate, which you can see here http://eu.earthwatch.org/events/2016/02/09/earthwatch-debate-does-nature-come-with-a-price-tag-

Joern's avatarIdeas for Sustainability

By Joern Fischer

I’d like to recommend the following paper:

Berbés-Blázquez M, González JA, Pascual U. 2016. Towards an ecosystem services approach that addresses social power relations. Curr Opin Environ Sustainability 2016 Apr; 19:134-43. DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2016.02.003

With the new IPBES framework and its focus on institutions, a shift towards governance-related issues is already underway in ecosystem services research. The paper recommended here adds an important new dimension, namely that of power relationships. These have, until recently, been largely ignored in ecosystem services research. The present paper makes three tangible suggestions for how power relationships should be more routinely examined in ecosystem service assessments:

1. by analysing how power shapes institutions, and how this in turn, creates winners and losers in terms of the well-being benefits generated by ecosystem services;

2. by investigating more carefully how ecosystem services are co-produced by people. Ecosystem services (especially provisioning services) are generated by combining human labour inputs…

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