Farmers reacted with fury today to Boris Johnson’s plans to rewild swathes of British arable and pasture land claiming swapping fields of cows, sheep and pigs for trees and bogs will put British food production at risk.
Today the Government’s £2.4billion-per-year plan to replace the European Union’s common agricultural policy will be launched.
And at its heart landowners will be paid to plant trees and restore wetlands and peat on 741,000 acres of land under the largest farming reforms in 50 years. The UK will receive funding for up to 15 nature reserve projects.
Farmers have said that Boris Johnson has become obsessed with rewilding – branding it ‘mumbo-jumbo c**p’ and putting it above food security, which has been harmed by Brexit and the Covid pandemic.
There are also concerns that the policy will reward rich landowners who have large amounts of land and can bring in millions in taxpayer-funded grants to plant trees, predicting ‘financial catastrophe for farming’ because of the ‘joke environmental idea’.
It came days after Ed Sheeran announced his own plans to purchase farmland to plant ‘as many trees as possible’ to offset his considerable carbon footprint after years of worldwide tours and jet-setting.
Chair of the NFU Cymru Milk Board, Abi Reader, said this week: ‘At some point growing food alongside nature became a dirty word’, adding sarcastically: ‘It’s ok because when we can’t grow enough to eat here we can import food from other places round the world & reassure ourselves we have the upper hand on nature’.
She is against the idea of’selling’ rewilding as the solution to all problems. It takes farmers “off the ground” at a moment when self-sufficiency is declining and rural communities are “fragile”.
Jono Dixon, a farmer in North Yorkshire, said: ‘I’m sick to death of all this tree planting re wilding bloody mumbo-jumbo c**p. Let us farm let us produce but for goodness sake leave us alone to do what we do best’.
Others have reacted equally angrily to the ‘obsession’ with rewilding in Government, which some have blamed on Boris’ wife Carrie Johnson and her ‘chums’ Zac and Ben Goldsmith.
Under the biggest farming reform in 50 years, farmers and landowners can be paid for their efforts to preserve nature.
The NFU also has concerns, with vice president Tom Bradshaw declaring: ‘At a time when public support for British food and farming is at a high, our biggest concern is that these schemes result in reduced food production in the UK, leading to the need to import more food from countries with production standards that would be illegal for our farmers here.
‘This simply off-shores our production and any environmental impacts that go with it and would be morally reprehensible.’
The plans will create 15 nature reserves that will help to restore rivers, lakes and streams and will also be used for the recovery of threatened species like the curlew and sandlizard.
The plans are expected to also benefit other threatened species such as the Marsh fritillary butterflies, the wild asparagus and the shrill-carder bee. These plans take effect in the coming year. They will begin with the restoration of 24,700 acres.
According to the Government, it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK by taking 12,000 to 25.000 petrol and diesel cars off the roads. This would be equivalent to 25-50 kilotonnes reduction in carbon. Despite the proposals’ large scale, some 22.2million acres of farmland will remain, so officials do not expect food output will be affected.
Common agricultural policy was criticised because it encouraged habitat destruction by subsidizing farmers according to the amount of land they had.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has unveiled the £2.4billion-per-year plan to replace the European Union’s common agricultural policy. Pictured is a curlew which will be one of the animals supported by the new policy
One scheme in the new plans, Local Nature Recovery, rewards farmers for ‘making space for nature’ in farms and countryside. These could be planting trees or restoring peatbogs, and the transformation of fields into wetland.
Landscape Recovery will bring about more radical changes. It will involve creating new nature reserves and floodplains, as well as the creation of forests and wetlands.
These two schemes are a continuation of the Sustainable Farming Incentive that was previously announced. It provided financial support to farmers who use pesticides less frequently, improve soil quality, and reward them for stopping local river pollution.
The schemes aim to bring up to 60 per cent of England’s agricultural soil under sustainable management by 2030. More than 3,000 farmers have already tested the new schemes, which will bring about the largest changes in agriculture and land management in fifty years. Today’s Oxford Farming Conference will see George Eustice, Defra Secretary, announce that applications for Landscape Recovery Projects are now open. He said: ‘We want to see profitable farming businesses producing nutritious food, underpinning a growing rural economy, where nature is recovering and people have better access to it.
One scheme in the new plans, Local Nature Recovery, rewards farmers for ‘making space for nature’ in farms and countryside. Pictured: A water vole
‘We are building these schemes together, and we are already working with over 3,000 farmers across the sector to test and trial our future approach.’ An early version of the Local Nature Recovery scheme will be on trial in 2023 with a nation-wide rollout from 2024.
Tony Juniper, chairman of government advisers Natural England, said: ‘More than two thirds of England is farmed and these reforms pave the way for those who manage the land to produce healthy food alongside other vital benefits, such as carbon storage, clean water, reduced flood risk, thriving wildlife and beautiful landscapes for everyone to enjoy.’
Dr Alexander Lees, senior lecturer in conservation biology at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: ‘Escaping from the clutches of the common agricultural policy, which has driven biodiversity loss across Europe by incentivising habitat destruction, represents a major opportunity to improve the state of UK nature.’
If the UK is serious in reversing declines in its diminishing species ‘we need to be racing towards the 300,000 hectare [741,000-acre] target as fast as possible,’ he added.
The new programs will all be voluntary, and farmers will decide which combination is best for them.
There will be 15 nature reserves, with the goal of restoring streams, rivers and lakes to endangered species like the curlew and sandlizard.
UK offers Leo charity £28k To protect dwarf buffalo
By Helena Horton for the Daily Mail
Leonardo DiCaprio’s green campaign group has been given £28,800 of taxpayers’ cash to lobby for ‘rewilding’.
The charity backed by the Oscar-winning actor, who is worth an estimated £200million, received the grant to protect a species of dwarf buffalo called the Tamaraw in the Philippines by conserving land from development, allowing it to remain wild.
The sum appeared in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ accounts as ‘official development assistance’.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s green campaign group has been given £28,800 of taxpayers’ cash to lobby in order to protect a species of dwarf buffalo called the Tamaraw in the Philippines by conserving land from development
The conservation initiative Re:wild was launched by DiCaprio (47) last year. It has attracted substantial donations. According to its website the actor ‘has provided more than $100million (£75 million) in grants to a variety of programmes and projects’, with Re:wild described as ‘the latest undertaking linked to DiCaprio’s environmental activism’.
The star’s most recent film, Don’t Look Up, sees a deadly comet heading towards Earth in what many have interpreted as a metaphor for climate change. He said of his role: ‘I just felt like this was an incredible gift to be a part of a movie that encapsulated exactly what we’re going through.’
Recently, the actor was criticized for traveling from New York to Miami in just one day after speaking at Cop26’s climate summit in Glasgow.
A Defra spokesman said the projects it supports ‘focus on local action… to address unsustainable use, habitat degradation and loss, whilst delivering poverty reduction’.
The conservation project Rewild was launched by DiCaprio (47) last year. It has attracted large amounts of donations.