Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Derek Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)]

It is good to see you in the Chair, Mr Davies. You were far too lenient on the EFRA Committee Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), so well done; that shows great character and integrity.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) for securing this critical debate. How wonderful it is to talk about the countryside, our farms and our farming and food production! We are up in London, in the midst of all sorts of nonsense, but for those who are privileged, as I am, to live in one of the most beautiful—mine is the most beautiful—part of the United Kingdom, it is great, when we get back to the constituency, to get out in the morning and have all that disappear while we appreciate God’s great gift of the countryside. It is fantastic to be able to talk about it today.

The three core areas of ELMS are: supporting sustainable farming; the recovery of nature; and collaboration between landowners to deliver, as hon. Members have said, public money for public goods. West Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly are great examples of where much of that has already been done. There is an irony, in that farmers who have been delivering public goods for a long time may not benefit in the way that ELMS intends, as they have less far to go to get our countryside to where it needs to be.

It is a great privilege for me to visit farms across west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly and see the good care and concern of farmers for the natural environment. They know it is the hand that feeds them. Many farms in Cornwall have developed the ability to produce food and energy. There was a time when Cornwall was the county that produced the most renewable energy on land in the UK. It also grows trees. I committed to planting 20,000 trees in 2020, and it was landowners and farmers who found pastures that were not productive for food, and who gave up that land so that the Woodland Trust, I and my volunteers could plant over 21,000 trees on it. I appreciate how long it takes for them to bear fruit, as it were, but planting trees is certainly an important part of managing our countryside; it has benefits for run-off and flood management, and is a good thing to do on balance.

We need to strike a balance between farming, food production and biodiversity. I hear comments—not necessarily from DEFRA, although comments can be misinterpreted—about the need to produce much less meat around the UK. That is most definitely true around the world, but there are examples on my farms where grazing and producing meat supports and enhances biodiversity. We need to be careful, in all messages from Government and DEFRA, to get the balance right. For promoting biodiversity and looking after many parts of our countryside around the UK, meat production is a positive and helpful thing, if done properly.

We heard about public money for public goods. I was delighted when the Secretary of State at that time came up with that expression. It reassured me that we were going to get the policy right and turn our backs on the common agricultural policy. There is an enthusiasm across farming for public money for public goods, but there is a frustration that it has taken so long to get the detail, and I worry that we might not be delivering what we set out to. Everything that has been said today pretty much agrees with what I am hearing farmers say.

On ELMS, as has been said, we need to ensure food is being produced. The first debate I ever had in Westminster Hall was on food security. At that time, we were producing around 54% of the food that we could produce in the UK. We have to increase that. We need to enthuse our farmers and, rather than bogging them down with red tape, give them a renewed passion and enthusiasm, and let them know that DEFRA and the Government are on their side when it comes to producing good, healthy food for our constituents to eat.

We learned in the pandemic that it was the local food producers that helped to address the food chain supply problems. Let us not lose the lessons we learned just two years ago. We must do whatever we can to cut through red tape and give farmers the enthusiasm to produce the food we need, and we must protect and value their knowledge. We have heard already about the knowledge of farmers. It is no accident that they produce food from the land they own or look after. It is an incredible art and a gift. It is years and years, or generations, of experience. If we do not get this right, we will lose them and that experience will not be passed on, which takes me to my next point. DEFRA and the Department for Education must get together and use ELMS, if possible, to promote careers in agriculture and food production in our schools and colleges, harnessing that experience and knowledge and giving young people the opportunity to have a job on the land.

We are concerned about mental health and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton said, particularly about mental health in farming. However, the countryside has an awful lot to contribute towards supporting people’s wellbeing and good health. We must look after soil security. The Climate Change Committee has talked about that. We allow our soil to wash into rivers and seas, where it is lost forever. We must be cleverer and use ELMS to stop that.

Although ELMS may encourage some farms to get things right, there is a danger that it will discourage others from engaging, and that they will work the land and the soil will be wrecked—it takes an enormous amount of time to recover soil. ELMS must deliver good soil health across the country.

Finally, we need to protect small farms. We have heard about landowners buying up parcels of land, and we are really seeing that in Cornwall. Small farms that are no longer viable are being snapped up by hobby farmers. They are maintaining a piece of countryside, but it is not as productive as it could be, and it is not supporting the opportunity to bring fresh blood into the industry. We must do everything that we can to support small farmers and to preserve small farms. We have to get on with that and not give in to those voices telling us to delay ELMS. Seize the day, get it right, and help our farms produce the food that we need.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I call Richard Drax. If you could keep it down to five minutes, that would be helpful.