Why We Should Support Farmers

Reasons why we should support farmers

Hugh Saxton

Local communities

Farmers and farms are an integral part of country life and their perspective and their skills are an essential part of the mix of people who make up the social life of our villages. Far too many villages are becoming filled with townspeople who want to change the country to their wishes - complaining when cocks crow in the morning or when manure has a smell. Farmers and farming support a number of other rural businesses - farm machinery and repair, blacksmithing, grain transporters.

Landscape

Much of our countryside is the product of farming activity and it is the farmers who plant copses or dig ponds, and who maintain the stone walls or hedges which give a pattern to the landscape (and give safe travelways to wildlife). The new CAP regime encourages them to do this but even before it came in, more hedges were being planted than were grubbed out. There is some way to go on hedge repair but who else will do it if farmers go?

One other point about hedges. They are best for nesting birds if not over trimmed and hedge plant that bear berries do not do so until the second year. So do not expect them all to be cut back every year. The Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) recommend cutting on a two or three year cycle except where the hedge is on a road or pathway.

Part of the joy of a landscape is to see herds of cattle or sheep grazing across a field. A purely arable landscape is much duller. What is more there are many wildflowers that only flourish in short pasture. So we should all support the farmers whose livestock we like to see by buying British meat or cheese, and where possible, local meat or cheese. But we need to press the Government to change the absurd rules which allow meat from abroad, produced to lower standards, to be labelled British if it is butchered in the UK. And we should remember that if farming becomes uneconomical we will see fields full of weeds and scrub or else given over to 'horsiculture'. Grazing horses do have a visual appeal but it would be a shame if they became the only sort of animals to see.

Climate change

When fuel comes from plants its use is carbon-neutral, i.e. the plant takes CO² out of the atmosphere and it is then returned when the fuel is burned. The use of such fuels, e.g. biodiesel from oilseed rape, bioethanol from corn or the use of elephant grass or willow as furnace fuel is still at a frustratingly early stage because the Government is not helping by applying lower taxes. But this must be part of the way forward.

Future shock

None of us can be sure that the present ease of getting cheap food from overseas will last. Apart from the reasons given earlier we need to have a flourishing farming sector so that we have a reserve against this kind of change.

February 2007