Hemmed in by the demands of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and ever more so by national and EU sustainability policies, farmers have much less freedom in how to run their businesses than many non-farmers realise.
Across the water, farmers got their chance in 2016 to break clear of the chains, in the UK’s Brexit vote, and many said yes.
In the coming years, Irish farmers will be casting their eyes across the Irish Sea to see what farming life looks like outside the EU, and if the faraway fields are indeed greener.
The UK experiment will in fact hold many lessons for EU farmers, because the ultimate objectives are similar.
The UK farming plan to contribute to the net zero carbon economy of the future, to protect and restore the environment, improve animal health and welfare on the land, help farm businesses become more profitable and sustainable, support confidence in UK food internationally, prevent environmental harm, and protect biosecurity and animal health and welfare, is in fact a carbon copy of the European Green Deal which increasingly directs the course of European farming.
The British will hope to achieve these objectives faster, now that they have shaken off what they see as an overly-bureaucratic CAP.
Irish farmers will have a ringside seat to watch how they get on.
Across the North Sea, Dutch farmers will also watch closely, perhaps with even greater interest, because the farmers of the Netherlands are very mobile, and have for centuries been moving to other countries or even other continents to pursue farming in more favourable locations.
There’s a new wave of Dutch farmer emigration currently, to destinations such as Germany, Denmark or Canada, because of their home country’s increasingly tough rules on agricultural pollution and emissions.
Land prices in the Netherlands are among the highest in Europe, another factor behind emigration of Dutch farmers. Only 100 left between 2010 and 2015, according to the Dutch Statistical Office, CBS. But emigration is thought to have increased to about 75 farmers per year since 2015.
Dozens of farmers in North Brabant, a Dutch border region where pig and chicken farms are concentrated, are moving to Belgium, according to local media, profiting from Belgium’s looser rules limiting the size of factory farms.
In future years, they may turn their eyes towards farming in the UK, but the UK’s stated drive towards sustainability is unlikely to make things easy for the Dutch, who are more orientated towards intensive farming.
So the eyes of rural Europe will be on the UK, where Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs George Eustice (they don’t have an agriculture minister) welcomed the post-Brexit freedom to “make our own laws again and to chart a new direction for agriculture policy”, and said the centrepiece of future UK farm policy will be the Sustainable Farming Incentive for approaches to farm husbandry that help the environment, such as integrated pest management, and actions to improve soil health or water quality.
New payments will be for farming more sustainably, creating space for nature on the land, enhancing animal health and welfare, and reducing carbon emissions.
Of course, the biggest change will be phasing out the EU legacy of direct payments, over seven years.
Eustice has acknowledged that overnight removal of payments would be too much, instead there will be some time for businesses and land renters to adjust to the changing market.
Eustice has said: “Rather than masking poor profitability with a subsidy, we should address the causes of poor profitability. Too many farmers find themselves in the position of being price takers with powerful processors or other purchasers pushing all of the risk down to the farmer.
“The Agriculture Act gives us new powers to create statutory codes and introduce other regulation to bring transparency and fairness in the supply chain.
“Now we will start with a statutory code in the dairy sector, but also intend to use these powers to bring fairness and market transparency in other sectors.”
He could have been talking about the Irish beef sector, in which farmers depend heavily on EU subsidies rather than prices paid by beef processors, to survive.
There are similar situations in the UK, with Eustice saying it is clear that imbalances of power within the supply chain have caused instability for dairy farmers, with milk buyers setting and then modifying at short notice the terms of contracts with farmers.
The Minister said it is unacceptable, and plans to strengthen the position of farmers in the supply chain and to bring transparency and fairness (maybe he should use Ireland’s successful co-operative system to protect dairy farmers).
Irish farmers will be able to see how strengthening the position of UK farmers in the supply chain goes, compared to the work of the Food Ombudsman to be set up here as part of our compliance with the EU’s Unfair Trading Practices Directive.
There will be those in the UK for whom farming changes will be too much to handle, and for them, Eustice has promised exit schemes to help farmers to retire with dignity, alongside schemes to support new entrants.
Irish farmers have been crying out for such an initiative.
The UK will also have Local Nature Recovery and Landscape Recovery schemes. Interestingly, it seems to be behind Ireland in protecting hedgerows, which Eustice says UK farmers have been under pressure to dig up.
Just as in the EU, top-down management of farming will inevitably bring bureaucracy. However, a promising start has been made, with the EU’s “greening” switched off (Eustice says it achieved nothing for the environment but caused huge bureaucracy).
The three-crop rule is gone, along with rules such as maximum width of a gateway, and guidance on the definition of fallow land.
Scheme deadlines and penalties have been loosened, and there will be more warnings and “improvement notices” rather than penalties for every minor scheme error.
The guidance accompanying this year’s BPS scheme has been slashed from 120 pages to just 50 pages.
In contrast, the Terms and Conditions and Guide to 2021 Basic Payment Scheme, Greening and other Area Based Schemes sent to Irish farmers in February is still 105 pages.
