Agriculture Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Greaves

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, during the last two, three or four months, like everyone else I have had quite a lot of spare time on my hands and have been able to get out into the countryside around where I live, which is on the edge of an urban area where you can walk straight into Pennine pastures, fields with gritstone walls and, beyond there, rising up to the moorland massif of Boulsworth Hill. Two valleys run down from the hills to where we live; they are really contrasted at the moment, as I will briefly explain.

Before I do so, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, is not in his place. He talked about going out of Sheffield on to the Peak District hills and delighting in what I think he called the song of the curlews, which are one of the evocative birds of the Pennine moorlands. The others are the skylarks and the lapwings, which locally are traditionally known as “tewits” after the sound they make.

During the past three or four months, I have been woken up every morning by the sound of curlews, which is wonderful, but when we first lived there 40 or 50 years ago, we were woken up by flocks of lapwings. I have not heard a lapwing from our house for a long time. Lapwings have declined most in that kind of area up on the moors, particularly in what the amendment refers to as “semi-natural grasslands”.

For us, the grasslands are pastures and fields; they have got tall, quite coarse, natural native grasses, and some better ones. We have some of what the amendment calls “dicotyledonous herbs”, although that really refers to lowland meadows rather than the sort of meadows we have, and lots of clumps of rushes, which are important for giving cover, along with the tall grasses, to ground-nesting birds such as curlews and lapwings—the tewits.

Over the years, the fields have been improved. Those nearest to us used to be buttercup meadows. They have long gone, and now a lot of the coarser semi-natural meadows have gone as well. The farmers scrape off all the vegetation which has been growing there and seed it with one or two species of much richer and, from their point of view, more productive grass, mainly for the sheep but also for mowing, haylage and so on.

The landscape has been transformed. The fields in spring, instead of being a greyish green—natural, as they were, or semi-natural—are now sparkling bright green, and no doubt some people find them attractive. The two valleys, however, are contrasted. One is the Wycoller valley, which largely belongs to Lancashire County Council—Wycoller Hall is thought to be Ferndean Manor from Jane Eyre—and the other is the Trawden valley, which has the old mill village of Trawden it and lots of farms around. The Trawden valley is bright green and the Wycoller valley is still very much as it was. How do you know where you are? If you close your eyes, in the Wycoller valley you can hear the tewits and in the Trawden valley there are none. It is as simple as that.

So it is not just lowland meadows that the amendment is talking about. I hope the new regime will stop farmers turning even more of the pastures into modern bright green pastures and driving away the tewits, which is still taking place at the margins and the moorland margins. The tier 1 or tier 2 deals that come about, whichever they are, encourage a reversion of at least some of the fields to what they used to be. If you have a farm of six or 10 fields, you do not need a lot of it to revert to the traditional pasture that it used to be to provide a flock of lapwings with a habitat; you might need one or two, and that is all. As you walk through that area, you can plot the flock of lapwings to the fields that are still traditional.

I hope that kind of thing will be part and parcel of the new regime, not to destroy farmers’ livelihoods in any way but to provide them with some finance to provide a natural, or semi-natural, environment that superb birds such as lapwings and tewits require.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, before I go on to talk to the amendments, I want to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made earlier today and make a plea to the Minister and the Whip to talk to the Chief Whip about the groupings. Can we please go back to the old way that used to happen in Committee, whereby the movers of amendments spoke first and then the other signatories spoke afterwards? All the signatories to my amendments have spoken before me, and on the next group of amendments I am a signatory to an amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but she, as the mover, is speaking after me. It really does not help proceedings unless we get back some sort of structure like we had in the old days.

I turn to the amendments. This is a hugely important group because I believe that the only way that farming will survive in this country is if we work with nature. All these amendments are designed to help farming to do just that. There is considerable overlap between them. I shall speak to Amendments 39 and 96 in my name, which relate to nature-friendly farming. Not everything that nature-friendly farmers do is covered in the Bill. For instance, what about the creation of new habitats, ponds and wetlands? That leads to another problem, because the creation of some ponds will require planning permission. Therefore, as I said, you need dedicated farmers who are very keen to help nature to carry out such work. A farmer taking these schemes solely to get money from the taxpayer is not someone who is going to apply for planning permission for a new pond. There is no mention in the Bill of field margins and hedgerows. These are hugely important as wildlife corridors, and nature-friendly farming is a great help in that respect.

It is tragic that we have seen the decline in 600 farmland species over the last 50 year. Of course, none of us now has the problem of having to wash our windscreens having driven through the countryside, particularly at night. That is long gone. When I first started driving, one had to wash one’s windscreen after every drive because of the number of insects that got stuck on it and impeded the view. It would be nice if we could go at least half way back to the situation that we were in.

I will just make a point on what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said about lapwings. I know a farm in Caithness where the farmer has farmed organically since he took over the farm—gosh—it must be 30 years ago now. He has farmed in a nature-friendly way, but the number of lapwings has decreased hugely. There used to be lovely big flocks, but now there are very few. The problem is, it is not the farming system—that is not totally responsible—but the fact that we do not control the predators of lapwings and lapwing eggs and nests, such as the hooded crow. When I was a boy, the hooded crow was a very scarce bird; it is now very common. When I last lived in Caithness, about four years ago, I remember seeing five hooded crows on the lawn outside my little cottage. They just would not have been there when I was a boy. Unless we get to a stage where we can control the number of corvids and the abuse by corvids of ground-nesting birds, there will be a continual decline, whatever system of farming one operates.

I have also put my name to the agroecology and agroforestry amendments, because these are hugely important too. They are slightly different ways of farming from nature-friendly farming, but they of course work on exactly the same principle of working with nature.

I pay tribute to the work of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Nature Friendly Farming and Agricology, which have been working together for five years. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Organic Research Centre and the Daylesford Foundation have together done a tremendous amount of work in this area and I can tell the Minister how grateful they are for the financial support that Defra has given them. It is exactly from institutions such as this and the demonstration farm at Allerton that other farmers can learn how to carry out these works and the benefit that they can contribute to their own farms. I hope that, when responding, my noble friend will say that this funding will continue.

I turn to Amendment 224, which is on soil. It requests that the soil metric index is instituted. This was of course in the 25-year environment plan, from which it is worth quoting:

“Farmers and land managers can struggle to monitor the quality of their soil, which in turn makes it difficult to improve. We will develop a soil health index (including indicators such as the level of humus and biological activity in the soil) that can be used on farms to check whether their actions are having the desired effect. At the moment, data on soil health is held piecemeal by different institutions and businesses. It is not easy to access or use. Defra will invest at least £200,000 to help create meaningful metrics that will allow us to assess soil improvements, and to develop cost-effective and innovative ways to monitor soil at farm and national level.”


Can the Minister say what is the result of that work? Is there any progress? What is the progress? Can she please update us on it?

It was encouraging to hear the Secretary of State respond to the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place recently, saying he was considering a combination of approaches to address soil problems, and a more sustainable approach to grade 1 and grade 2 agricultural land, focusing on soil health and crop rotations. What is this going to involve? Can the Minister shed some light on these very encouraging statements?