Agriculture and Food Industry

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, like others, I must start by declaring an interest as a farmer and, perhaps uniquely, I am a fruit grower; I am not sure anyone else here is. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Plumb for having initiated this debate.

I want to concentrate my remarks on trying to illustrate to what extent over past decades—and, I am certain, in future decades—the agricultural sector was and will be dependent on its research base. It always interests me how quickly policy, as determined by successive Administrations and Ministers, changes for this sector. For example, in the early days when my noble friend was starting his career at the NFU, food security after the war and the need to ensure that farm incomes matched urban incomes would have been important, hence the deficiency payments.

However, to back up the rapid changes in agricultural production, there was massive and very successful investment in agricultural research, development and extension. This led to a dramatic increase in productivity. We farmers would like to claim the credit for this, but if we are absolutely honest, we knew that we were enormously lucky to be able to exploit some rapidly moving technology in agricultural engineering, plant breeding, animal husbandry and the like. But, of course, in the very seeds of success lay the future problems, such as surpluses, leakages into soil, air and water—in other words, environmental damage—and animal welfare issues, as husbandry lots got ever larger. People resented the changes to the landscape. They noted the loss of biodiversity. Frankly, it was not surprising that, if you were trying to crop ever larger areas ever more intensively, there would be losses to biodiversity, as indeed there were. Of course, the agenda changed to meet some of these issues. Human nutrition has been referred to, and there have been a number of startling food safety issues, arising sometimes from production systems but very often from imported diseases which, in an era of globalism, become ever more prevalent.

So there was little enthusiasm, for more than 25 years I would say, for supporting production systems. When I say that the policies changed, I have to reflect with some shame that on my farm I have not only, 40 years ago, taken grants for taking out hedges, but 20 years ago I took another grant for putting them back in again. That illustrated how one tries to do what is right by the system of the day, though successive generations may not welcome what we have done.

Research emphasis in recent years has been particularly on enhancing farm biodiversity. Much can be done on this; it does not have to be organic. As we heard in the earlier debate, there are many other ways of delivering on this. Delivery of ecosystem services is rather a jargon concept, I admit, but it is nevertheless a very important point. Farmers have instinctively understood that soil conservation, flood control and water purity are services that the land manager provides. Of course, we now understand how this can be encompassed into food production systems in a way that does not lead to adverse consequences. As a fruit grower, I am now very much more aware, as I should have been in earlier years, of just how reliant we are on insect pollinators—not just imported honey bees but a wider range of insects. That is where getting the biodiversity of the plants right, at least in the pollinator strips, can play a very important part.

Likewise, there has been a greater emphasis on the non-food crops: biofuels, vegetable oils, pharmaceuticals and plant based chemicals. There is nothing new in this. Agriculture has always provided for industry, manufacturing, energy and transport, but with the range of non-food crops we are moving into some new areas of cropping.

The long and the short of it is that food production is the core business of agriculture. Food production must be done, in modern parlance, sustainably—in other words by reducing its adverse impacts on the environment and delivering, so far as is possible, enhancement to the environment. We have been encouraged—this has been successful—to get closer to the customer and add value to our products. Farmers’ markets and shops have been a useful way of making the consumer more aware of where their food comes from.

I go back to the present occupation. We are back to taking food security much more seriously; not so much in the United Kingdom and Europe, but globally. The figure of 9 billion people who need to be fed, requiring at least a 60% increase in production, has already been mentioned. Companies such as Syngenta, which represent a large part of the research base, not just here in Europe but elsewhere, have set themselves the target of increasing average productivity of the major crops that they support by 20% without using more land, water or inputs. This is a challenging target, but a sensible one and I am absolutely certain, given the success that we have had in previous generations, that it is realistic.

The Government are to be congratulated on having recently introduced the new industrial strategy for the field of agri-tech. My noble friend Lord Plumb referred to robotics, satellite tracking and the like and the prevalence of new entrepreneurial farmers adopting systems that come out of molecular biology and other biological sciences. All this is very valuable. The investment of £160 million of new money in this industry-led strategy is to be welcomed. But, again, I say that unless you bed all this down in agronomy and in farming systems that are demonstrated to work and to reduce impacts and leakages, we will miss the vital connection. I worry enormously about the great loss we have had within the research and development sector over the past 25 years. Frankly, universities have very little, if any, capacity to do field research now. I used to chair something called the Agricultural and Food Research Council. That is now subsumed into the BBSRC. Those institutes have almost all gone—not John Innes or Rothamsted, which have been mentioned, but so many of the others. There is no horticultural station left. As a fruit grower, I worry enormously that East Malling research station, which is a private, charitable trust, has an enormous responsibility but very little funding any more. Again, we are seeing whole sectors of our agricultural production and horticulture—strawberries, raspberries and the like—being left without a research base.

We should not rely on Holland and other European countries, as I do. We need to take stock of our national capacity and recognise that, if we do not keep the research infrastructure in place, in future we will lack the capacity to achieve the great success that farmers have witnessed in adopting new technologies.