Farming, Nature & Flood Control
There have been so many mis-steps by this Labour government in its first few months in office that it’s hard to know where to start. But the latest came in last month’s budget over its approach to farms.
The issue that’s grabbed most of the headlines is the change in inheritance tax rules which could impact family-owned farms which want to pass on the farm to the next generation. The Government needs to find a way to differentiate family farms from large estates bought to avoid tax and reconsider the £1 million threshold. Many family farms are worth much more than that, even though the farmer’s income is often very low.
What’s had less attention is the worrying freeze in the subsidy paid to farmers to encourage biodiversity on their land, amounting to a real-terms cut. This will make it much harder to achieve the switch to nature-friendly farming which is so vital to reverse the decline in wildlife, clean up our rivers and make farming more resilient to climate change.
The Government has its own legally binding targets on improving nature, a recognition of the fact that we are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Yet when it comes to the crunch, the budget for achieving that is going down in real terms.
It is not only deeply short-sighted. It shows ministers just don’t understand the severity of the climate and nature crises. Both will have, and are already having, a major impact on the food we grow and our food security.
Let’s take the nature crisis first. Anyone who’s been walking or driving through the countryside over the years will have noticed the drastic decline in insect life. Insect numbers are down almost 60 percent in the past 20 years so we’re seeing fewer moths, flies, bees and butterflies. All of these are important pollinators for crops as well as our gardens.
Then there’s the state of our rivers. Only 14 percent of rivers in England are in good ecological health, none of them are in good overall health. This is partly down to water companies dumping sewage in the rivers. But, especially in areas like Waveney Valley, it is also a result of agricultural run-off from fertilisers or animal waste.
The chemicals from fertilisers and waste from slurry create algal blooms, disrupting ecosystems in the water and leading to “dead zones” for animals and plants, effectively killing the river.
The Government is reviewing the way water companies are regulated to try to curb their pollution of waterways and this is welcome and long overdue. But the review is largely ignoring waste from farms which accounts for 40 percent of water pollution, according to Defra. All the more reason for the Government to increase the funding available for nature-friendly farming to the levels the nature charities are saying is needed.
The health of our rivers is vital both to nature and our own health and wellbeing. It needs to be made a priority.
I had the chance to visit a couple of our local rivers recently, in the company of the Little Ouse Headwaters Project and the River Waveney Trust, both brilliant charities which are working to improve the health of the rivers and see how they can be better managed for the benefit of wildlife, people and the climate.
That brings us to the climate crisis. The last 18 months have been the wettest since records began in 1836 – a pattern which is likely to become the new normal with climate change. Although England has escaped the devastating floods which have hit Spain and other parts of Europe this autumn, many local communities have been affected by flooding in the last year and the frequency and severity is only likely to grow.
So flood management, especially in an area like East Anglia, has never been more important.
Gone are the days when engineers sought to channel rainfall as fast as possible into rivers. That just led to the rivers becoming overwhelmed and flooding areas further downstream.
The aim now is to hold back the water, using natural techniques like installing “leaky” dams to release water slowly, planting trees, digging ponds to store floodwater and protecting floodplains.
In Gissing, the River Waveney Trust and Norfolk Rivers Trust worked with the local community, landowners and the parish council to create a natural flood management scheme to make the land more flood resilient. They deployed low-cost solutions such as leaky dams, tree planting and using an adjacent meadow to temporarily store water so that heavy rainfall wouldn’t rush into the river and overwhelm it.
Eight named storms later, including Storm Babet in October last year, and no homes have been flooded in Gissing showing that natural flood management works.
The Little Ouse Headwaters Project is working to create a continuous corridor of wildlife habitat along the headwaters of the river, including restoring natural river features, all with flood management in mind.
Both are great projects but run on a shoestring, often with a large reliance on volunteers. Funding is always a challenge, making it difficult to scale up the work they’re doing which is vital if we’re to successfully manage flood risk and let nature recover.
I will continue to press the Government to invest properly in the nature-based solutions that are needed to support farming, restore biodiversity, capture carbon and manage floods.
