Margins of madness!
Geoffrey Hopton, former regional director of the Countryside Landowners’ Association and a consultant on rural and agricultural matters to Worcester based solicitors Morton Fisher, comments on the margins of madness!
The news has got about that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is being reformed and with that came the news that if farmers wanted payments they had to follow a strict code of rules involving public, plant and animal health, food safety, animal welfare and the protection of soil, habitat and landscape or cross-compliance for short.
Now farmers are used to regulation and they have been fighting red tape for years, but one thing has really got their goat and candidly that is not surprising. Go back a few years and listen to the environmentalist’s tune all over again. Farmers were wrecking the countryside by grubbing up hedges and reducing the wildlife corridors by increasing the size of their fields. The arrival of prairie farming many people called it.
Go back not so far and farmers could be seen putting this process into reverse. Helped as they were by the new Stewardship Schemes from the Countryside Commission and MAFF’s own Environmentally Sensitive Areas Scheme they started putting back hedges, reducing some field acreages and introducing new habitat by leaving uncultivated margins along their field boundaries. This has been a process that has really taken off in rural England. Indeed it was so successful that not all the farmers who wanted to join it were able to due to a shortage of funds.
So what went wrong? Well, nothing yet, but we could be about to enter a period of what might be called Whitehall farce. It is that CAP reform we started on about. In England, but not in Wales, (Oh! The Land of Song can teach us a trick or two) every field must have an uncultivated margin, two metres wide on all its sides. You do not need to be an Archbishop to realise that those with smaller fields will be hit harder than those farming the wide-open spaces. What a slap in the face for those with small fields or who have planted up more hedgerows or worse still for those who have kept their farms as they were all these years.
That is not the only problem, because in their efforts to be reasonable and because that is the way MAFF, now DEFRA have always done it, they measure the margin from the centre of the hedge. Apparently DEFRA’s own surveys show that in Cornwall the average width of a hedge is 3.58 metres. If you take half that and subtract the statutory two metres you come to a figure that a carpenter would use a tape measure to mark.
Is there need to go on? Come on DEFRA take your example from Wales and do what you have been doing for years, leave the field margins to your environmental schemes. Think the word partnership and work with the farmers not against them.
