Agriculture Bill (Third sitting)

Abena Oppong-Asare Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Goodwill]

Q Conversion to organic farming is quite an expensive process, because during that conversion period one cannot sell organic products. Do you think there should be more incentives for farmers to switch to organic production and, if so, how can we ensure that we do not flood the market with organic food and therefore undermine the whole economic basis for organic farming?

Gareth Morgan: That is a well-made point. In food, demand and production need to be balanced. That is true not only of organic produce; it is a general point.

One key point is that it would be helpful if the Bill recognised the specific contribution that organic farming can make against a whole range of public goods. Rather than inventing a complicated system in parallel with organics—for example, saying, “If a farm satisfies the carbon criteria, the biodiversity criteria, the rotations and the rest of it, then we will make a payment”—let us just cut to the chase and say that it makes sense for there to be some kind of organic maintenance payment to recognise additional public goods that are there but cannot be recovered through the market. I think that would in some sense help with the conversion issue, because if farmers are clear that if they move to an organic model they will be rewarded, both by the market and for the public goods that they provide in the longer term, then that will give them that level of certainty.

Regarding conversion, you are right—I think there needs to be caution around doing that, because in the past we have had examples of where there has been over-conversion to organic ahead of the market being ready to be there. So I think the focus on some sort of organic maintenance payment in ELMS is absolutely vital.

There is a role for help with conversion, but it may not be in terms of straightforward payments during that period. It may be through things like the ancillary productivity payments or some of these other issues that are acting as a barrier to conversion. For example, bringing livestock back on to arable farms will be quite a difficult operation, and most people who convert to organic would need to do that if they are an arable farm. So help with the process of establishing those things might be the way that one could assist in that process.

[Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

Q As you know, clause 1 provides financial assistance for protecting and improving the quality of soil and, as you mentioned earlier, soil is highly variable and it is difficult to set the standards equally across all the farmers. You mentioned something about tools for farmers—being given specifically, I guess, for the 25 years that you mentioned. Are there any specific measures that you would like to see mentioned in relation to soil health?

Gareth Morgan: At the end of the day, there will have to be some sort of whole-farm planning process. I am sure the Minister has thoughts about this: there is an aspiration to reduce our transaction costs, around the amount of advice and so on that schemes involve. I think there is a limit to how far that can go, so at the end of the day I suspect that any farmer who is receiving substantial public good payments will need to have some kind of system of working with an adviser around a whole-farm plan, which will enable them to put the measures into place, particularly for something like soil.

There are general measures that are great for wildlife and the environment, like having flower margins around fields, having rough grass margins and the rest of it; they will be useful anywhere. With something like soil, I cannot really see how that can be done without the support of an agronomist, or a specialist, or someone helping the farmer and working on the nature of the soil on that particular farm. That need not be done by Government advisers; it could be done by certifiers, or private suppliers and so on. But without that level of support being built into the system, it is quite hard to see how farmers will be able to make the transition that they might want to make on their farm to things like sustainable soil management practices.

[Miss Sarah Dines (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

Q Mr Morgan, in your written submissions you criticised the Bill as it is currently drafted for not having clear targets for soil health. I represent the Derbyshire Dales area, which has a massive variation of soil qualities from the flats to the higher land. How can you possibly fairly have targets, and how would you measure them, to make sure that those of my farmers who put a lot of effort in to improve the soil, but who will get a lesser result because of the nature of the soil they have, can be fairly rewarded for providing a public good improvement?

Gareth Morgan: I am quite pragmatic about where those targets should lie and if it is not in the Agriculture Bill, there are other places; I have already alluded to the potential for both the Environment Bill and the 25-year plan to be the place where those targets and metrics could reside. It is disappointing that at the moment the Environment Bill does not have a soil chapter, because it would seem to me logical for that to be the place where, say, a target for increasing organic matter in soils at a national level would reside.

Regarding the targets for an individual farm, clearly it would not be sensible for those to be iterated in this Bill, because they might have to be done farm by farm. However, some provision for making sure that farmers are clear what they are working to on the soils on their farm over a particular period will be vital. I do not know whether some provision can be made in the Bill for there to be that level of assessment before public good payments are made on a particular farm, for example, because you are right: unless the farmer is clear about their current resource or what the expectation is about where they will be going, it is going to be quite—and this may be one of the reasons why soils were not previously itemised in the Bill, because of this precise problem about that geographical specificity.