Queen’s Speech

Lord Swinfen Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swinfen (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that the Minister will send a copy of today’s Hansard to HM Revenue and Customs and point out my noble friend’s speech, which HMRC should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.

I live in an arable farming area in the south-east of England, and my remarks will be based on that. I recall, back in 1962, being given by my mother a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book on the evil effects of pesticides. I also recall, some years later, the problems when DDT was used in subtropical parts of the world to deal with the Anopheles mosquito in an attempt to prevent the spread of malaria. They did not succeed in doing that but instead polluted the land, because DDT is a pollutant. I suspect that in some of those areas the land is still polluted, because they probably did not have the wherewithal to clear it up. I understand that DDT has since been banned.

I am surrounded by arable land. A few years ago, a large field with a young crop of rape was liberally spread with slug pellets. I do not know how many pellets there were to the square yard, as I did not count them, but if you had put down an outstretched hand, there would have been a lot of them underneath. Hedgehogs died, because they eat slugs. We have not had any hedgehogs since. I know that there has also been a disease, but their deaths may have been caused by the pesticide that was intended to deal with the slugs.

We used to have swallows at home, in large numbers, some of which nested in an outbuilding. I cannot blame my neighbour who owns the land because for many years an agricultural contractor has done the work on it—under contract, I believe—and I suspect that it does not matter to the contractor what state the land is in when his contract comes to an end. The swallows died. We had one swallow last year. I found it lying on its back on the ground. We have had no more since. That is a terrible waste, and it will take years for swallows to return because they normally nest in the same area each year. It will also mean that the farming practices around us will have to change so that they have the flies to feed on.

There are no larks, no starlings, apart from one or two, as opposed to the large flocks that we used to have. In the agricultural fields around us there are no sparrows; there are hardly any birds at all. There is not the food for them. There are no butterflies. Walking the dogs I did come across some bees. They were on the track and they were dying because of the insecticides used on the crops.

What I am saying about the area in which I live is probably happening in other parts of arable farming in this country. I know that we need to produce as much food as we can as cheaply as we can, but is it worth losing our wild flowers and our normal insects? In the summer I used to be bothered by flies; there are not any flies to bother me any more. There are not any bees and not many wasps.

Last year there was some rain while the harvest was taking place near me. They had to keep the men employed and the machinery operating, so they trimmed the hedges. They trimmed off all the berries that the birds, if there were any, would have eaten during the winter. There was no food for the birds over the winter.

While I have been there, which is over 40 years, the land has had only chemicals and no dung put on it. The land is no longer ploughed but is cultivated, and not to the old eight inches deep as with ploughing. In days long gone past, dung would have been ploughed into the soil, which helped with the drainage of rain from the soil while at the same time retaining a supply of moisture in the soil for the plants to grow.

Of late, even the straw which used to be chopped up and ploughed in—or rather cultivated in, because it is only the top two or three inches that is cultivated nowadays—is being carted away, I suspect down to the West Country where it is being used for animal bedding, or possibly animal feed, and not put into the soil. No humus is going back into the soil at all. I wonder what is happening to the condition of the soil. Vegetable soil takes 1,000 years to form; it can be destroyed in the matter of a few years.

I do not blame the owners of the land. Their farming is all done under contract, with the contractor—I do not know who it is; I do not want to know who it is—quite obviously wanting to make as much money as they can out of the land as quickly as possible, and then abandon the land and go on elsewhere.

The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, mentioned nitrogen on the soil. It is one of the few things that are put on. The run-off produces the most terrific weed growth in the local watercourses, blocking the watercourses, and then has to be removed at considerable expense. I wonder to what extent that caused the flooding on the Somerset levels. I do not know; I am not an expert. It is only a question in my mind.

I have another question. I am not a farmer and know nothing about the common agricultural policy, but I wonder if part of this is a result of the common agricultural policy, and whether we ought to have a very good look at what we are doing to the soil in the agricultural areas of our country to make certain that it is useful and in good condition for years and generations to come.