MEPs ‘need educating’ over agriculture policy reforms

Gail Souter, senior adviser on the CAP to the NFU, said MEPs could influence the settlement and had to understand why farmers were worried.

She told a meeting of the West Yorkshire branch: “We want to get them out onto your farms so you can show them.” She called for volunteers to get in touch with the regional office.

Mrs Souter ran through the many unanswered questions in the draft CAP. She said “dog’s breakfast” was the polite version of the NFU view of it.

Proposed restrictions on grassland development threatened to cut off any escape route for struggling dairy farmers. A requirement for at least three crops on arable holdings raised many questions and problems. And it was still unclear whether the UK’s environmental stewardship schemes could be counted towards the “greening” qualification for a third of basic farm support.

Hill sheep farmer David Airey, from Silsden, said it should be made clear on behalf of farmers in Uplands ELS that “there is no more greening left to find”. He was also concerned that the new scheme for Less Favoured Areas was likely to exclude farmers on town edges, and Mrs Souter confirmed the danger was there.

Defra Secretary Caroline Spelman went to Brussels this week with Ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, who have their own problems, because they have to move towards the English system of calculating entitlements.

Speaking for the UK in general, Mrs Spelman said in Brussels: “The proposals for the ‘greening’ of direct support payments need far more work. Simply taking land out of production is not sensible and the proposals on crop rotation are far too bureaucratic and inflexible.”

Despite her words, NFU president Peter Kendall, speaking at the Agricultural Industries Confederation conference at Peterborough, said Mrs Spelman was not showing enough concern about the danger of reducing food production in the name of biodiversity.

He said: “We face the prospect of seeing an area the size of Northamptonshire mothballed.”

The West Yorkshire NFU meeting this week also heard from Chris Franklin, a Leeds-based civil servant involved in delivery of the new £2m Farm & Forestry Improvement Scheme, which offers grants for business development with a green spin-off – see http://tinyurl.com/bnnt7zh for the Yorkshire Post report on it. He said applications needed three quotes for costs and farmers should start work on that as soon as possible.

He said optimising springs and boreholes would not qualify but rainwater capture would.

And the money could not pay for statutory obligations like slurry storage. His agency, the RDPE, will hold a workshop on the scheme at the Yorkshire Agricultural Society hq at Harrogate on November 30. Call 0300 060 4459. To download briefing notes and application forms, see http://tinyurl.com/cxqpykc/