Modern Farming and the Environment

Debate between Dan Poulter and Colin Clark

Tuesday 12th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Colin Clark]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Young as I look, it was not many years ago that I was one of the—[Interruption.] Is that going to be a point of order? I was one of the youngest people sitting round the ring at Thainstone mart, buying cattle; the average farmer was aged 60 to 65. Let me comment, in response to my hon. Friend’s point, that perhaps the common agricultural policy payment scheme has, if anything, stopped the intergenerational change, and now that we are able to design our own policy, I hope that, as I said to the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), we can find a process to encourage new entrants. However, we cannot get past the fact that this industry is hugely capital-invested. We have to be realistic about what we are bringing new entrants in to do.

Since the war, there have been three generations on my farm in the north-east of Scotland. My grandfather was a doctor from Glasgow, but mysteriously decided to be a farmer. Apparently, land was cheap in the 1940s—there was a chap with a moustache who wanted to devalue most of the land in Europe. My grandfather bought a farm in the north-east and he will have started off the soil process of modern farming by putting on lime and draining the land. My father will have gone to the next stage by analysing the nutrient value of the crop and trying to do something about further drainage of the land and improving the soil. It is an ongoing process. Finally, I tried to introduce precision farming to reduce the compaction of soil.

It is important to recognise that farmers have made mistakes on land usage. My businesses previously were in East Anglia, where I saw monocultures. I recognise that monocultures do nothing for the soil. We have a relatively traditional approach in Scotland. Water will clearly become more of an issue, even in wet Aberdeenshire, where we already have nitrate-vulnerable zones. We must be conscious that the water is affected by everything that runs off our land.

On that point, having run businesses before, I was amazed to discover that as much as 75% of the nitrogen used on crops cannot be used by the crop. If cars leaked 75% of their fuel from the tank, we would try to redesign the system. Farmers are well aware that some of our farming practices can be improved. There are great opportunities in technology. Air is clearly a public good. Agriculture is said to produce 10% of gases emitted, but we have come a long way.

The NFU’s report showed that we increased economic growth in agriculture, while reducing the inputs, between 1990 and 2016. Farmers are taking action while output increases. This is an important point. Modern farming tries to produce as much as it can from an acre, in an efficient and sustainable way. Some 87% of farmers are recycling waste materials from their farms, 69% are improving fertiliser application accuracy, where, as I have said, an enormous amount can be done, 75% are improving energy efficiency, not to mention the amount of renewables, 38% are increasing their use of clover in grassland, 27% are improving nitrogen feed efficiency for livestock, and 27% are increasing the use of legumes in arable rotation. In all those figures there is still a great deal of room for improvement.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. He is making a good point about the contribution that many British farmers are making to reducing their carbon footprint. Does he agree that there is an environmental argument for supporting British farmers, in order to reduce the food miles associated with importing a lot of food, and that, particularly in the post-Brexit landscape, supporting British agriculture to reduce our carbon footprint and ensure sustainability will mean reducing the food miles from imported food?

[Colin Clark]

It is also an issue of displacement. If we are too restrictive and prohibit too much in the UK, we may simply displace productivity to other regions, such as the Mediterranean, where water is obviously in short supply, and where aquifers may be used that cannot be resupplied, or—the classic example—the rain forest; we may import beef from there, because it is cheaper, but there is a huge environmental impact. When we make policy decisions, we have to be careful not to displace production from the UK, where we have high sensitivities, to other countries. Perhaps we need to find technological answers to that problem.

There are examples of piecemeal policy on renewable energy. The report from the National Farmers Union and NFU Scotland both commented on this. Take the issue of anaerobic digesters in the renewable heat incentive scheme. There are monocultures of maize in northern Europe, Germany, the Paris basin and, to some extent, parts of England. In creating a monoculture, we have to be very careful not to create a problem, whether that is soil erosion or potential for further flooding, for the sake of producing what is effectively very expensive energy. In the north-east, a 3,000-acre traditional rotation farm might these days just grow grass. Growing grass is less damaging than growing maize, but I am concerned that we are subsidising things that distract us from our primary aim, which is to produce food. We have to make sure that the policy is sustainable. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is looking at the fuels used in anaerobic digesters.

Also on the renewable heat incentive scheme, there is concern in Scotland—and, I am sure, England—that in the forestry industry, raw material is being cut down immaturely for use in RHI. We policy makers must not deal with one issue or priority without thinking about what could roll on from our actions.

[Dr Poulter]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I expect he will come on to the fact that the common agricultural policy disproportionately rewards larger farmers and large landowners, at the expense of many smaller farmers in the UK. A consequence is that many smaller farmers are looking to diversify out of necessity, to maintain the profitability of their main farming business. As part of our green and environmentally friendly agenda, we should help farmers into suitable diversification into renewable energy where that can help the profitability of the farm.

[Colin Clark]

I would say there is an opportunity there. Smaller farms can come together to share machinery. There are also schemes for them to come together to share environmental and biodiversity priorities. There is an opportunity for smaller farms to interact. Scale is not everything. Clearly, sharing a combine over many thousands of acres will lower the cost of that equipment per acre. Aberdeenshire is not unusual in that respect. It is rural, but not all of it is arable. I would rather not suggest that this is all about farms becoming much bigger, and us ending up with a similar situation to East Anglia, which is a relatively large-scale operation. East Anglia is also a good example. In Cambridge and Suffolk, G. S. Shropshire & Sons Ltd are doing some brilliant things on biodiversity and having a more holistic approach to their farms, instead of simply using the land for the crop that they want, and not being concerned about the next stage.

If we are to preserve the environment, wildlife and habitats, we must consider the potential of the most productive land. In Scotland, under the CAP regulations, we have seen as much as 10% of very productive land being taken out of arable use, rather than other land that would be better suited for environmental schemes. We all remember set-aside, which, in the long term, created weed banks and other problems on farms. We have to consider how to make the most of the best land, and make it as productive as it can be, in a holistic and sustainable way.

I recently read about gene editing technology, which offers us an opportunity as we leave the EU. I hope the EU changes its mind about this technology. It could offer the answer with regard to drought resistance, plants capturing nitrogen, pest resistance and the reduction of pesticides. On animal diseases, too, there are opportunities and technologies that we should be looking at.

Last July, the European Court of Justice declared that gene editing crops had to jump the same bar as genetic modification, but it is significantly different technology. While I am not an expert on it, I would like us to explore it further. I am particularly conscious that we have some of the best research and scientists in the world, yet we are giving up an opportunity to look into a very interesting area that could have answers. According to scientists from the Sainsbury laboratory,

“This ruling closes the door to many beneficial genetic modifications such as breeding of disease-resistant plants”.

They added that it was

“A sad day for European plant science.”

While we do not want to drop our standards, there is genuine science that we should be exploring and looking at. Policy mistakes have been made in other parts of the country that I do not want to see here, so I would like to hear what the Minister has to say about gene editing.

Farming should be able to monetarise environmental benefits such as carbon sequestering. The Scottish NFU says that it is

“supportive of measures such as carbon accounting, which offer farmers the tools and recommendations to make efficiency improvements whilst also taking into account business operations.”

That is poignant, because if there is a zero-carbon target, we have to get much better at accounting for sequestering carbon on farms. We hear about industrial ways to capture carbon, but every day that we are in the countryside, we are standing on the biggest carbon bank that this country has. Particularly in northern Scotland and the central highlands, with regard to reinvigorating—