Sustainable Farming Incentive: Species Management and ELMS

Lord Sewell of Sanderstead Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sewell of Sanderstead (Con)]

My Lords, as a new entrant farmer, I think that there is another kind of endangered species that we have missed here, and that is the farmers themselves. As I have come into farming, lots of people are just leaving it. One of the reasons for that is that we have a sort of existential crisis around what a farmer is.

I would like to shift the debate a bit. I welcome ELMS and the shift away from the CAP to what we have now—I have come in the middle of that transition period—but one of the things that worries me is that we probably almost need to do away with the notion of the farmer itself. I do not even know what a farmer is any more. Because of the way we have set up so-called incentives, we are not really sure what we are doing. What we need to do is think about some of the complex relationships that we have.

I welcome the Rock report—all your Lordships should read it. It is an excellent document and it takes up this real issue of tenant farmers in relation to landlords. We have to deal with that issue. Defra is in there, as are environmentalists. Everyone is thrown into this kind of complex relationship, yet the definition of what a farmer is in a sense becomes problematic.

I would argue that, at the moment, the farmer is almost enemy number one. It never used to be like that. If you raise cows, you are polluting the air. If slurry comes from your farm, you are destroying the waterways. Suddenly, our romantic image of what a farmer is has changed, and in a sense the farmer now becomes the environmental villain in the piece. That is not a great incentive to get into what is a very difficult industry and—I will not be political here from this side of the House— to make money, because at the end of the day, that is the driving force behind this.

There is a need to see this as two things. It is a business, so if you are going to incentivise, you also have to incentivise the market. One of the things we need to do is to redefine farming itself. I would prefer us to be called agri-innovators. I say that because I looked at the amount of money and risk, and at the hedge funds and everybody else who piled into the tech revolution we had recently, where money was poured into start-ups. Strangely enough, with that risk, nobody made a lot of money. When so many of those start-ups came in, we threw money at these alleged tech gurus who came out of university and gave them millions of pounds, but we never saw a return on it. Yet when you look at the farming sector, we do not see any of that kind of incentive in terms of the market.

I would therefore argue, as a good Conservative, that the Government stay out of some of this, and that we need an agricultural sector that is linked to the market and driven by the market. Obviously, there are controls that we need to have. However, as my noble friend rightly said, if you are actually in farming itself—or agri-innovation, let us call it—you are incentivised anyway to control the species. You have to in order to make the thing work. There is a market incentive in doing that.

In addition, what really are we now? I look at the farming community. We probably have some very big agri-industries, and I agree that there are the bigger ones. But what happens with the smaller sectors that I am involved in? We should be doing lots more added value; we should be dealing with agri-tourism. We have to be a little more imaginative. To be honest—I will probably get some pushback here—I think that some of my peers are not very imaginative in the way they are using their farms and the sector. We have to think much more around different ways of doing agriculture, which is not necessarily all about food production; there is education, farming in terms of restaurants and food to table. There are so many other things you can do around this area, which does not just mean trying to load food on to a lorry.

In some ways, I would like the Government to be thinking about helping the industry to become almost much more like the tech start-ups that we had, but perhaps this time with some more incentives. The incentives must be properly around those farmers who are moving innovation and doing things that are different, adding value to their products. That is the new way to go with this, and to avoid this area where new entrants—the few you can get—are coming in, and everybody else is piling out.

What is being left with the land in the end? It is really left to do other things, or bigger landowners come along and gobble you up. There is a need for a different way of doing farming. I ask my noble friend to help us by coming up with models that he could share, on websites or wherever the Government can promote and champion farms and agri-innovations that are doing things that are out of the box and different, and encourage the kind of energy for a younger set to come in. I will be honest: I am 64 and I am one of the youngest people in my sector. It does not seem to be a young person’s game, which is another thing that we must have in this area. We need to think about growing that sector so that it is attractive for young people to come into. That was not the case in the tech sector. We saw the age framework there. I cannot understand why farming cannot have the same kinds of interest and engagement.

Secondly, the sector has to have a link to science. That is why I call it agri-innovation, because the new agri-innovator has to have knowledge of science. You cannot be doing this without that knowledge. It is not instinctive; there is some great technology out there, some great things that we can be applying to the space, and we are not doing that enough. The agri-innovator is geared towards funds coming towards them and having an agri-business, but at the same time the agri-innovator is doing great things in the application of science to agriculture.

By the way, that is what I am trying to do at my place. We are doing great things. Obviously, we are using green technology, et cetera, but you can do lots of things, particularly on agri-tourism, where lots of people now want to come to see, understand and learn, so you are also an education space. So this whole thing has to change. We have a new Minister here and I am sure we will have new ideas coming in, but I am arguing that we should be championing the whole idea of getting a new generation into agriculture via that route.

On ELMS, I agree with my noble friend that I do not really want lots of regulation. People are being very snooty about the market and it working and not working, but we are driving this towards the big incentive, which is “Cash in the bank, please”—because that is really what this is about here, that is the big innovator: “You will take care of your environment”, et cetera. I know that mammon is not the only thing that drives us, but at the same time, it helps. You are coming out of farming because you are not making any money. The reality is that we need a vision and leadership that really sees agriculture as business, as science innovation and as something that we feel that we can actually make money from and get a real job from. So I urge the Minister to address some of these issues and come up with some answers on how he thinks we can make this work so that Britain can once again become a leader in this sector.