Bleak warning over threat to family farming

The economy, landscape and environment of areas such as the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors could face serious damage if the traditional family farm is driven out of production, it has been claimed.

Research into England's upland farming industry has painted a stark and worrying picture due to a combination of low levels of profitability, a high dependency on subsidy payments and decreasing numbers of farmers.

The study, produced by the Food and Environment Research Agency at York and academics at Gloucester University, has been compiled ahead of the reform of Europe's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a process which could radically reform the way farmers are paid.

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The future of subsidy cheques such as the Single Farm Payment, a measure which provides farmers with income not linked to production, is currently under consideration. The researchers said that if it was withdrawn or scaled back, up to 40 per cent of hill farmers could quit agriculture – spelling "significant losses" for the number of jobs and skill levels in the areas.

Recent studies have shown that one in five hill farmers did not expect their business to continue beyond the next five years, with more than a quarter of farmers having no plans for succession.

The new study, which will be presented to Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, said, however, that a loss of so many farms would have far more profound consequences for upland areas in the shape of a less productive economy.

The study claims the traditional small-scale family-run farms that have characterised the North York Moors and Yorkshire Dales for so long will continue to disappear and be replaced with fewer but larger farms.

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Its authors state that "few of the farmers interviewed made a consistent profit from farming and many said they were unlikely to do so in the near future".

A withdrawal of Single Farm Payments would see farmers forced to produce less food and take off-farm work to compensate. Farmers interviewed for the study predicted that more marginal areas would effectively be abandoned and left to go wild. The natural habitat of upland areas would also be affected with the loss of hay meadows, stone walls and traditional farm buildings – meaning a dramatically altered landscape.

One of the farmers interviewed for the report, a dairy and sheep farmer from the Yorkshire Dales, said: "You have got to keep the younger people in the Dales, There is not enough money to keep people in farming, it's bred into them but then again you have got to have a reasonable living."

Another Dales-based farmer, who farms beef cattle and sheep said: "In the last 20 or 30 years more than half the farms have gone. At one time 70 acres was a farm for a man, you could make a living on 70 acres, now you can't."

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The National Farmers Union county chairman for the West Riding, David Airey, said that while reliance on subsidy payments was not the situation Yorkshire's hill farmers want it was sadly a reality.

"The report confirms what we have been saying for a while now. Figures show that upland sheep and upland cattle producers are losing money hand over fist from a production point of view. It is only when you bring the brown envelope into the equation that it becomes viable.

"We need to get the price of production up to a sustainable level. Introducing more green measures is well and good but if more farmers chose to leave production that will be to the detriment of the environment. "Grazing animals is what keeps the land in the condition it is in. We are facing a situation where we will have more mouths to feed – we need to producing more food not less."

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