Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to encourage investment in on-farm (a) water storage and (b) irrigation infrastructure.

The Environment Agency’s National Framework for water resources highlights a number of actions that will help farmers and growers improve water supply resilience. These include:

• Promoting and facilitating the establishment of Water Abstractor Groups to enable a better understanding of future pressures and of business risks around access to water.

• Supporting farmers and growers with a Defra-funded programme of Local Resource Option studies to help them identify, screen and rank options to improve water supply resilience. These are costly investments, and we want to take time to make sure the support is targeted at the most effective solutions.

• Supporting the implementation of “smart farming”, where technology is used to:

o understand near-real time water availability, to enable abstractors to take water when it is there.

o improve irrigation scheduling and sensors to optimise water use.