My Lords, as this is the first time I have spoken in Committee, and for the purposes of all the Committee stage, I declare my interests as a retired farmer and landowner, as chair of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and chair of the steering group of the Government’s Global Food Security programme.
This is a strange grouping, and I wish to speak to three completely different aspects of the group. Starting with Amendment 12, I join most of my colleagues in emphasising the importance of helping farmers to welcome schools, families and other citizens to their farms. It is vital that people from all backgrounds, especially inner cities and the BAME communities, are helped to make that all-important personal connection to our wonderful countryside in a way that is more meaningful than sitting and watching it on telly. It is vital that both the joys and hardships of rural life are understood by as many people as possible.
We are a very crowded nation. I believe England is the fifth most densely populated country in the world. Yet we still have some of the most fantastic countryside. I would like to hope that that countryside, and the farmers who created it and now manage it throughout all seasons—hot and cold, wet and dry—will continue to be an inspiration to our children and grandchildren, and that it will always be part of that unique heritage which we pass on with pride to those who come after us.
I turn to Amendment 32 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on the advancement of technology. As you might expect, I am very keen on agriculture and environmental technology and the advancement of robotics. I have an amendment later on genetics, so I will keep my powder dry on that, but robotics has huge potential as well, using small or mini tractors in each and every field. I hope that these tractors will eventually be not be much bigger than, say, a large suitcase with arms on wheels or tracks, even, which would be great for avoiding soil compaction. Let us hope that they will also be cheap enough for African smallholders to own.
They will come out of their small electric charging sheds, probably in the middle of the night, check that it is not raining and that the soil is dry enough to work, then using minimum tillage techniques, plant the crop. In Africa, of course, they will emerge only if the automatic connection to the local weather station says that it is going to rain in the next few days, because the timing of planting crops in Africa, in relation to the coming of the rains, is crucial.
After this small robotic machine has planted the seeds, it will wander around the growing crops looking for signs of pests and diseases and then either warn the farmer, hoe the weed or squirt each leaf with whatever treatment it needs to make it healthy. Note that it will squirt only the individual leaf, not the whole plant, let alone the whole field as is done at present, so the use of pesticides and herbicides will be reduced to an absolute minimum, partly because only the individual leaf is being treated and partly because the treatment will be carried out the moment the problem has appeared, thus, one hopes, preventing it spreading throughout the rest of the crop. Such robotics will revolutionise
the growing of crops in our country and, more importantly, in the developing world. What is more, we in this country are at the forefront of these developments and with the right funding we would be the leader in the field, so I support Amendment 32.
And now for something completely different, I turn to Amendment 43 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and others. I welcome the tenor of this amendment, although I also recognise the Government’s desire to limit the ambitions of ELM schemes to what is already in Clause 1. There is no doubt that ELMS cannot be all things to all men, although we in this House might like to hope so. However, it is always good to have a debate and to get the Minister’s response on the Floor of the House, and I hope that in this case other bodies, such as local authorities, local town councils, national park authorities and even public-spirited companies, will pick up on this issue and take it forward in the spirit of the new rural environment we hope to create with the Bill.
When I chaired the Countryside Agency, a long time ago—at the turn of this century—we looked carefully at local food chains and what we could do to help. We realised that “Buy British”, for instance, was a forlorn gambit that had never and would never work with the buying public, but all our research indicated that customers really liked the idea of supporting local growers and local businesses—ie, Farmer Bob and his daughter down the road. Incidentally, under Covid, new supermarket research has shown that the “buy local” trend is now really taking off. So at the Countryside Agency, we sponsored and helped to promote farmers’ markets. In many towns local shopkeepers loudly objected to this “undercutting competition” as they called it, but they soon discovered that on market days the town was rammed with punters, which of course made their turnovers boom as well. Every town should have a farmers’ market or a local market, but they need kick-starting, usually with some form of public money to begin with, even if it is only rent holidays for stall-holders.
At the Countryside Agency we also had our “Eat the View” campaign, which tried to persuade customers who loved their local countryside that the best way to support it was to eat its products. The phrase “eat the view” came from curmudgeonly farmers of the 1980s who complained about the emphasis on the environment over food, and used to say, “It’s all very well but you can’t eat the view”, and we said, and I still say today, “You most certainly can.”
Another relevant scheme we had was our market town initiative. We had some good rural supporting projects at the Countryside Agency. If a market town was going to act as a hub for tourism and its surrounding villages, it needed to promote itself with a local theme, usually involving local products from either a local business or a farm. A very good example of this was Bridport in Dorset, which was brought low by the demise of its rope-making industry, but has now reinvented and revived itself as a thriving must-be-at destination, largely based on local food. It has a brilliant local market on Wednesday and Saturday every week of the year, and it hums—or at least it did before Covid-19.
What I am saying is that given a small amount of pump-priming and organisational help, such projects can make a big difference to local farmers and businesses and would be totally in line with the Chancellor’s desired economic boost. The difference would be particularly apparent where the farms were small and the land did not lend itself to large agricultural enterprises. We should remember that it is just that sort of land that is probably the most highly prized by the British public, because it tends to be the most beautiful, and it is just those farmers and land managers whom the public would expect their taxes to support.
So, we must have local ELM schemes, locally envisaged and run by locals for locals. Perhaps I can end with a good example from the Blackdown Hills AONB in Somerset. Two or more decades ago, with lottery and local authority funding, the Blackdown Hills Business Association, including many farmers and small businesses, was started. It has training sessions for its members in everything from IT to marketing and takes a large tent at the local show to market its wares. With now more than 100 members paying membership fees, it funds itself, but it needed funding for its first 10 years. It is the encouragement and flexibility of that sort of funding that we are asking for here, so that, for example, farms and businesses who are not lucky enough to be in a really good AONB can also hope to get that kind of support.
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