Countess of Mar
Main Page: Countess of Mar (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Countess of Mar (CB)
My Lords, like other noble Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer. I regard her as my friend because we work together on so many topics in this field. I declare my interests as entered in the register.
In more than eight pages of answers to questions on biodiversity sent to us by the House of Lords research services, I was shocked that there was not one mention of soil health. Without healthy soil, you can forget a healthy ecosystem. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization gives this definition:
“Soil health is the capacity of soil to function as a living system with ecosystem and land use boundaries to sustain plant and animal productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and promote plant and animal health. Healthy soils maintain a diverse community of soil organisms that help to control plant disease, insect and weed pests, from beneficial symbiotic associations with plant roots; recycle essential plant nutrients; improve soil structure with positive repercussions for soil, water and nutrient holding capacity, and ultimately improve crop production”.
Along with a lot of organic farmers, I believe that now is the time to take crop production away from the chemists and place it in the hands of the biologists, where it should be. A recent report by the Committee on Climate Change indicates that the degradation of soil is now a major crisis across the globe. It is particularly concerned about the state of soil in East Anglia, where intensive farming practices, deep ploughing, short rotation periods and exposed ground have led to soil erosion from wind and heavy rain. Soil is not simply dirt in which crops grow with the aid of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and fungicides. Indeed, it is these very products that destroy or inhibit the natural propensity for healthy soil to nurture the more than one tonne of bacterial and fungal biomass to be found in healthy temperate grassland. It has been calculated by microbiologists that 80% of soil nutrient functions are controlled by microbes.
Last August, I had the enormous pleasure of hearing Dr Elaine Ingham, founder of the Soil Foodweb, Inc, address a conference on soil health. She also addressed this year’s Oxford farming conference on the same subject. This lady has studied soil for more than 40 years and I recommend all noble Lords look at references to her work on the internet. They really are enlightening. She explained that plants use sunlight to make sugars, most which are sent to the plants’ roots as exudates that aerobic bacteria and fungi feed on. These beneficial microbes cluster around the roots. They protect the plants from anaerobic micro-organisms that cause disease; they break down and transform inorganic nutrients in the soil into organic nutrients for plants; and they play a critical role in the formation of the soil structure, which is necessary for water retention and to prevent nutrients from leaching. She explains that, in the life-to-death-to-life cycle, protozoa, nematodes and micro-arthropods eat the nutrient-containing bacteria and fungi, and it is their excretions of excess nutrients that constantly replenish the food supply for plants.
Every time chemical pesticides and fertilisers are applied to crops, they have an effect on the micro-fauna in the soil. Every time heavy equipment passes over the ground to apply these chemicals, the soil is damaged by impaction, and aerobic bacteria cannot survive in the anaerobic conditions that result.
That ubiquitous product, glyphosate, has recently been categorised by the World Health Organization as a probable carcinogen. It was first licensed as a powerful chelator. This means that it locks up many of the essential trace elements and minerals that plants, animals and humans depend upon for their health. It was later registered as an antibiotic. We do not need much imagination to envisage what an application of glyphosate, in the form of Roundup or one of its many other trade formulations, can do to the soil microbes, do we? It has been found to remain active in soil and water for much longer than originally thought, and recent German research has shown that residues of glyphosate found in the water column and sediment of the River Elbe inhibit the nitrifying bacteria which play an essential part in the nitrogen cycle. Glyphosate affects the shikimate pathway in plants and is described by its manufacturers as being safe; they seem to have forgotten that bacteria in water, soil and in the guts of animals and humans also have the same shikimate pathway and are also weakened and destroyed by Roundup.
Is the Minister aware of a considerable body of research which indicates that Roundup is not the benign herbicide we have been led to believe that it is? Is he aware that commercial preparations containing glyphosate have been found to be more than 1,000 times more toxic than the active ingredient alone? Will the UK be following a number of other countries such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Brazil, which are considering severely restricting the use of, or even a ban on, glyphosate-containing products?
The Minister knows of my concerns around neonicotinoids, which I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. I am aware that an emergency application has been made by the NFU for a licence to use them prophylactically on rape crops in a limited area. In response to an Oral Question from me on 17 June, the Minister told the House that the application was being considered by the Expert Committee on Pesticides and by the Health and Safety Executive, and that their advice would then be considered by Ministers. In a recent paper, Conclusions of the Worldwide Integrated Assessment on the Risks of Neonicotinoids and Fipronil to Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning, the 30 researchers concluded that:
“Overall, the existing literature clearly shows that present-day levels of pollution with neonicotinoids and fipronil caused by authorized uses … frequently exceed the lowest observed adverse effect”.
Lord Blencathra
I stand corrected, quite rightly so.
There is no doubt that farming practices in Britain and in all practices in Britain and in all efficient western economies have changed dramatically over the past 40 to 50 years. There is a huge demand for food, and most of the public seem to want it at dirt-cheap prices. That means that farmers have to farm more intensively. If we do not do it here, we will simply end up losing UK agriculture and getting all our food from abroad. The abandonment of the countryside may be good for some wildlife but it is not a practical consideration. It stands to reason that, if farming has changed, there will be a change in the numbers and types of wildlife that formerly depended on past practices. We know that farmland bird populations are half the level of 40 years ago. Hares and hedgehogs are declining, hedgehogs catastrophically so. What can be done about it? There is more wildlife on organic farms, of course, but organic farming is just not economic for more than 90% of farmers. If all our consumers bought only British organic produce, that would be a totally different matter, but that is not going to happen and it would not apply to most wheat and grain production. Part of the answer is in agri-environment schemes, where farmers are paid to keep field margins wild with no crops on them or to keep wetlands or other features that harbour wildlife. That is costly to the taxpayer, but if the public want it, the public will have to pay for it.
Cost of production is a determining factor. Take milk production. The big dairies and supermarkets are paying farmers less for milk than the cost of producing it. There is no way, in that situation, that dairy farmers can decide to grow hay, let the wild flowers bloom and the wildlife thrive and cut the hay late in July. Farmers have to grow silage, stuff it full of nitrogen, squeeze out at least two cuts per annum from every inch of their fields and leave them as bare as a bowling green at the end of it. Until that fundamental economic dynamic changes, we will not get Gainsborough-style scenes of flowering hay meadows and carts being loaded by glowing country lads and wenches.
I would like to see some carefully controlled experiments with rewilding in the United Kingdom or in England. It has worked for beavers and I hope that Natural England, or whatever it is called this week, will look carefully at other proposals for, say, brown bears, lynx, wild horses and wolves in very carefully selected parts of the country, after full consideration of all potential negative effects on other species and humans. Creating habitats for those species will automatically create habitats for hundreds of others, for the bugs and little beasties we would not normally see, and for flowers, and so on.
However, without straying too far from the subject matter of this debate, preservation of our wildlife is not uniquely a countryside or farming responsibility. I suspect that most town people think that all wildlife is supported by the countryside and that that is a farmer’s duty. Not so. Our towns and cities are vital to UK biodiversity. Of course there is more biodiversity in our countryside, because it is larger than our towns, but acre for acre, towns and cities can support as much wildlife of certain species—particularly birds and mammals—as the countryside. However, in the last 40 years, the decline in species and urban areas has been even greater than in farmland. The noble Baroness rightly said that the public have a vital role. Yes, but not just in going out to the countryside to monitor what farmers are up to; they also have a vital role in their own back gardens and front gardens. The State of Nature report of May 2013 states:
“Of the 658 urban species for which we have data, 59% have declined and 35% have declined strongly”.
Reports show that our hedgehogs will be extinct within 10 years. How in the name of goodness can we let that happen? As well as being killed on roads, they are being driven out of town gardens. Thousands of gardens are being paved over every week, depriving a whole range of mammals and birds from getting a food supply, and precision larch lap fences and walls do not leave gaps for hedgehogs and other species to get through. Urban dwellers can save the hedgehog and they must rise to the challenge. Keeping hedges is also important. Even leylandii hedges provide tremendous cover for nesting birds.
I end with a more sensitive issue, but one that has to be addressed. A United States study in 2013 showed that US cats were killing between 1.3 billion and 4 billion birds per annum. That is just birds; when you add all the other species it comes to tens of billions. A United Kingdom study a few years ago estimated that British cats killed 200 million mammals per annum, including 55 million birds. However, that is a gross underestimation. The United States has 93 million pussycats; the UK has 12 million. If British cats are killing birds at the same rate as American cats—and there is no reason to believe that they are not—the British bird population killed per annum is 175 million.
Do noble Lords wonder why we no longer see any sparrows in our cities? That has nothing to do with farmers. Sparrows are the top kill birds for cats, followed by blue tits, blackbirds, starlings, thrushes and robins. Then, of course, one can add the shrews, voles and mice, including harmless little field mice. I am appalled to read of those millions of people who let their cats out to roam at night and others who think that they do not need to feed them so much because they can go out and kill things in the wild. They are killing things in the wild and wiping out our urban wildlife. Let me be clear, I am not advocating drastic action against little pussy cats and moggies. I do not want a fatwa against me from Cats Protection but I am asking for an education campaign for cat owners.
We will find it difficult to get measures to increase biodiversity in the countryside but it is not up to farmers alone. Everyone, especially people in towns, can do their bit and we will have to do our bit if we are to retain some of our splendid and unique British wildlife.