My Lords, I am flailing around slightly but I want to make a different point. The noble Lord’s point is well taken: there is no point in food waste unnecessarily going to landfill. It can also be composted in the right mixture with other green waste, and so on. That is an alternative, because it then makes a very good soil improver. The only problem is that the regulations around the mobile plant SR2010 No. 4 permits that you have to get can hold things up. They can be quite difficult to get and there is sometimes quite a backlog. The other thing is that you do not really know how much they are going
to allow you to put on. Instead of trusting your agronomist to get your fertiliser recommendations right, the Environment Agency insists on trying to do it some time ahead. I am not quite sure why.
The Environmental Agency seems to think that farmers are trying to poison their soil. A sensible farmer is not trying to poison their soil. They will have a proper agronomist giving recommendations. That would be much easier to manage, because you have to start putting the waste onto heaps during the year. You cannot suddenly get, in our case, 12,000 tonnes out of a composting operation in one month. You can only put it on in that gap when you are harvesting, before you cultivate the next year. You are expected to incorporate it within a day, because if anyone complains about the smell they come down on you like a ton of bricks—even though there can be other farmers spreading slurry and all sorts of manures around the place, so the smell could easily be coming from them.
At the moment, those who are trying to avoid food waste going to landfill are sometimes having a difficult time. It might be nice if the Environment Agency looked slightly more kindly on it at times. So far we have not had any real problem, but I can see it building up. Last year we suddenly had the amount that we could put on reduced, which caused a certain amount of chaos to our planning because we buy fertiliser a long time in advance, and so need predictability. It would be far better to leave it to our agronomist.
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