Home for Holly Purdey is Horner Farm, a 200-acre farm in Devon with permanent pasture and herbal lays supporting cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens. At this time of transition in the world of agriculture, NFFN England Vice Chair Holly reflects on the subsidy offerings in England’s Environmental Land Management schemes and what they might mean for farmers such as herself, trying to build a resilient business in the face of uncertainty and risk.

 

The call of the cuckoo arrived in the woods surrounding our land during May; the return of birds heralds the arrival of my favourite months on the farm of May and June, when all feels fresh and the joy of summer ahead fills me with motivation and hope for the farm. Spring was slow to arrive this year, with a continual cold wind blowing across the fields and the soils taking time to awaken from the wet depths of winter.

Yet the cuckoo’s call has started to fade from our countryside, as one gentleman recently remarked, “They would drive us mad with their calls, yet now we feel lucky to hear them.” The cuckoo is symbolic of wisdom and change, helping to guide us through periods of disruption. This is never more relevant than now as we head towards a general election.

It brings many questions to the forefront of our minds as farmers, just as we were beginning to feel settled on the path laid out by the current administration. Will the current budget be maintained? Will the direction stay on the path that has already been laid out? With calls from different parts of the industry wanting different outcomes, can we stay on a path that will ease the transition to being paid for public goods and positive environmental practices?

Our own farm currently sits in Higher Level Stewardship, Mid-Tier Stewardship, SFI 23, FIPL Project, and we are within a consultation phase of a Landscape Recovery Project. It can be exhausting trying to juggle all of the scheme’s requirements, annual submissions, and capital works. The lure of combining them all into our Landscape Recovery Scheme, which moves into its final phase in the coming months, is so incredibly exciting for our farm, thinking long-term with just one agreement. But what will occur if these are delayed, derailed, or adjusted based on budgets or incoming administrations? I hope that the civil service will themselves stay constant in this time of change to help all farmers feel confident in their decision-making.

Just as we have a change of government, our farm has been undergoing changes since the beginning of the year. We are being bolder and taking the leap into removing all concentrates from the sheep flock. Our failure to achieve this in the goat herd has led to the decision to no longer keep goats in the near future. It can be hard after years of keeping a goat herd - a popular addition to our meat sales. Ultimately, especially as we are now in organic conversion, the cost of organic feed and our questions around bringing in an outside energy source to feed a ruminant didn’t sit right for the business or our process in assessing our impact.

A land use framework is more important than ever. As we hear calls for food security, we need to ask ourselves as farmers: is the best use of significant proportions of arable land to produce animal food? In our case, the answer was ‘no’ for our goats: the output was not high enough to justify not only the cost of the input but also the impact of growing, processing, and shipping the product to us.

I am not a purist - I don’t believe every farmer should turn all their flocks and herds grass-based tomorrow. It has taken us years of breeding and a lot of trial and error on permanent pasture fields to get to this point, but we do need to think about how the land is best used in the UK. If we had a functioning land use framework that guided direction, this would go beyond a governmental change and help inform national policy and decision making.

We have limited land resources in the UK, so it is key as farmers that land under our tenure delivers the multiple benefits of food and environmental outcomes and positive impacts for our communities. We can deliver this, as is being shown by many, but what we now need is a budget to back up this delivery plan and provide stability as we go forward.

I was recently invited to attend an evening reception at no. 10 Downing Street to celebrate the Farm to Fork summit. It felt exciting to represent our industry and bring a positive voice for nature-friendly farming into the room. Still, despite the joy of walking up the stairs and seeing the photographs of our prime ministers displayed in beautiful black and white portraits, the opulence did not hide the fact that this felt like a photo opportunity for the current government to show they are working with farmers.

I ended up having a great opportunity to meet insightful individuals and have open conversations, yet when Steve Barclay stood up and delivered a soundbite of a speech, I could not have been more disappointed to hear not one word of the environment or climate change mentioned. When we talk about food security, we ignore these two key topics at the peril of the very food security we are proclaiming to want to protect. I stood there, barely hiding my frustration as he spoke while small canapes of food were passed around, barely enough to satisfy my young sons, let alone a room full of farmers.

James Robinson, our England Chair, was invited to the daytime summit and was able to feed into the working groups rather than just enjoy the evening mingle. We need to have our voices in the room, and despite the hunger from the nibbles, I was glad I continued to champion our cause.

So let us hope in the months ahead, as the cuckoos return on their journeys in the autumn months, that they leave behind their power of transformation and wisdom to whoever will be sitting in the offices of Defra.