Agriculture and Horticulture

Lord Swinfen Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swinfen (Con)]

My Lords, I am not a farmer. However, I like to think that I am a countryman. I live in an old farmhouse surrounded by someone else’s farm. It is farmed not by him but by a contractor. What I am about to say may be specific for that reason rather than applying generally throughout the country.

I understand that there are now far fewer mixed farms than there were 30, 40 or 50 years ago. A number of them have much less in the way of livestock or no livestock at all where they had it before, and there are now a number of very much larger arable farms—farmed, of course, with modern machinery and much less labour.

Some 70 years ago, from my observations there were far more butterflies and insects. In fact, back then, as a small boy among many others, it was great fun to catch butterflies in a butterfly net. I understand that that is now illegal and I suspect that that is because of the reduction in the number of butterflies in the country.

I have also noticed that there are far fewer starlings around. Noble Lords will recall that in the past when going to Trafalgar Square there were thousands and thousands of starlings every evening and in the mornings. Their number probably declined there as a result of the reduction in the number of horses in central London. However, their number has dropped in the country as well. I have not seen a large flock of starlings flying round at dusk for many years, and it used to be a very common sight. I suspect that it is partly because of the arable farming that goes on today.

When the crops were off, farms used to lie with spilled seed on the ground for weeks if not months. Today, around me, they are very often ploughed in within a matter of days of the harvest being taken off. There is no food left for birds or other wildlife.

We used to have swallows at home. The last time I saw a swallow at home it was some three years ago and it was lying on its back on the ground, because there are no flies around. The farmer around us regularly sprays his crops with insecticide. There are no flies for the swallows, for the swifts, for the martens or for the flycatchers, and others that live on flies. Consequently, there will not be the grubs in the ground for those that eat the grubs there. One of the only benefits as far as I can see is that we are no longer, as humans, pestered by flies in the summer, which must be a great advantage for horses and ponies as well. Farmers provide game strips because they want to increase the number of grey partridges, but where are the insects for the chicks to eat? They have all been sprayed out. The partridges will not stay in the partridge strips. They are adventurous; they go among the other crops and they die.

Hedges were taken out—those who did it probably got a grant. Other hedges have now been put back in, some in the same place and some in different places, probably with another grant. But they are cut mechanically and no longer cut and laid as they were in the old-fashioned way. It means that the bottoms of hedges are thin. There is no cover there; there is less cover for the birds to build their nests, and nothing for small mammals on the ground.

We used to have hedgehogs around us, lots of them, brought in every night in the summer by my dogs. They had to be rescued and freed again. Some three or four years ago, a crop of rape all around us was smothered in slug pellets, making the slugs poisonous to the hedgehogs. Since then, I have seen one hedgehog only.

We get a lot of moles in the lawns in our garden—an awful nuisance—but it is the only area around where there are sufficient worms for the moles to feed on, because, with no muck being put on the fields, there is nothing for the worms to eat. While we have been in the house—we moved there in 1974—there was one field of navy beans ploughed in because it was so wet that it could not be harvested and one field on which sheep were folded one year, but no organic compost has been put on to that land in all the time that we have been there. It means that when it rains heavily and there are no crops on the ground to hold the soil in place, it is washed off. That is the topsoil. What is left is the organic soil.

I know that we need to produce food and need modern farming methods, but they must be combined with keeping the standard and structure of the soil healthy for the future. If we lose the structure of the soil, I understand that it takes at least 100 years to produce an inch of good soil on top. What are we doing to this green and pleasant land? Many of your Lordships will have read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. It should be compulsory reading for every agricultural student. I am not against modern farming practices, but I wish that the farming community could manage to keep the soil in good condition to maintain our wildlife and our birds, which we need. We cannot afford to lose them.