Natural England knows best?

[ajcc]

It’s in the name of the department that gets to administer the scheme. If it’s NE administered, then farmers, as food producers are in for troubled times cause food does not feature.

 

[Steevo]

Kind of depends I guess. The 'income foregone' element would obviously be an average over the entire country, so if your BPS payment is 90% of your profit as things stand, then your farming activities aren't making much profit anyway. So when BPS goes you'd have to go into ELMS to get any profit at all. Whereas Mr '4 tonnes an acre' would be making a decent margin even without BPS, so for him it would make sense keep farming the lot and ignore ELMS. The trick Defra have to pull off is to set the payment rates at a high enough level that allows the marginally profitable land to keep going, but not too high that everyone in the land puts every acre possible in because its a licence to print money.

I don't have much sympathy for DEFRA trying to pull off this trick.....they've been driving farming down and down which has partly caused this situation.

As you say the wheat price will make or break ELMS.....there's plenty of hassle producing a decent wheat crop what compared to 20-30 years ago so it's far from easy. Any scheme involving DEFRA is bound to be 100x more hassle though.

Trouble is I doubt many of us would expect current wheat prices to be maintained for the next 5-10 years.

I think @onthehoof sums it up well - could well be just as profitable to sit on your hands and do nothing.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

Kind of depends I guess. The 'income foregone' element would obviously be an average over the entire country, so if your BPS payment is 90% of your profit as things stand, then your farming activities aren't making much profit anyway. So when BPS goes you'd have to go into ELMS to get any profit at all. Whereas Mr '4 tonnes an acre' would be making a decent margin even without BPS, so for him it would make sense keep farming the lot and ignore ELMS. The trick Defra have to pull off is to set the payment rates at a high enough level that allows the marginally profitable land to keep going, but not too high that everyone in the land puts every acre possible in because its a licence to print money.

It's always going to be verging on the impossible to come up with a scheme that works just right for the whole of England as it is so diverse. The trouble is whitehall seems incapable of running regional schemes let alone local ones.

 

[steveR]

It's always going to be verging on the impossible to come up with a scheme that works just right for the whole of England as it is so diverse. The trouble is whitehall seems incapable of running regional schemes let alone local ones.

Maybe do them on a County level... I haven't a clue how it would work though...

 

[ajcc]

Oh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....

 

[teslacoils]

Have you told them your costs are now £300k, and invited them to settle?

 

[bluepower]

Oh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....

More money than sense, what an utter shambles these people are. Who has funded their costs so far? I think we all know the answer to that. They really must be held accountable for their actions but will probably just hide behind the charade that is Natural England.

 

[teslacoils]

They will just say "statutory duty to investigate....public interest......lessons to be learnt".

 

[Ffermer Bach]

The country seems to be run, by an unaccountable bureaucracy, mostly QUANGOs and lead by a small coterie of left leaning people, who move through revolving doors when they change from one organisation to another, see Paula Vennells (ex post office head). Whenever they muck things up, they move on to another organisation with nothing usually being done, except for us the tax payer having to shoulder the bill. A national disgrace.

 

[bluepower]

The country seems to be run, by an unaccountable bureaucracy, mostly QUANGOs and lead by a small coterie of left leaning people, who move through revolving doors when they change from one organisation to another, see Paula Vennells (ex post office head). Whenever they muck things up, they move on to another organisation with nothing usually being done, except for us the tax payer having to shoulder the bill. A national disgrace.

The other person in charge at the Post Office at the time was Tim Brooks, now top of the tree at the National Trust. Rather ironic don't you think?A finer example of the lesser spotted fffing idiot you could not wish to meet. Enough said.

 

[steveR]

Oh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....

Was that a FoI request??

Ludicrous amounts of money being spent by these bodies. Madness.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

Was that a FoI request??

Ludicrous amounts of money being spent by these bodies. Madness.

One wonders just what the full business case for that expenditure actually is?

 

[farmerm]

Kind of depends I guess. The 'income foregone' element would obviously be an average over the entire country, so if your BPS payment is 90% of your profit as things stand, then your farming activities aren't making much profit anyway. So when BPS goes you'd have to go into ELMS to get any profit at all. Whereas Mr '4 tonnes an acre' would be making a decent margin even without BPS, so for him it would make sense keep farming the lot and ignore ELMS. The trick Defra have to pull off is to set the payment rates at a high enough level that allows the marginally profitable land to keep going, but not too high that everyone in the land puts every acre possible in because its a licence to print money.

Given that the total pot is less than the BPS pot in real terms ELMS can never be a license to print money. I cant for the life of me work out how Defra/Natural England will work out how to set payment rates for different options that are attractive enough yet don't bust the budget. For every ha that used an option which pays 5, 6, 7 times more per ha than BPS there needs to be 5, 6, 7ha of land elsewhere that take nothing from the pot. In the (probably unlikely) event that some options prove too popular, what mechanism would they have to deploy to keep total payments within budget? A competitive element or perhaps the retrospective cutting back of payment rates on options that are over subscribed?

 

[Extreme Optimist]

You would think there would be some cost:benefit analysis done on these cases. We reckon they spent about £50K fighting me over a disputed £6k variance in land area. They were subsequently found to be wong in much of it and had to pay £4k back to me and admitted that the remaining £2k was tenuous but knew that it would cost me too much to get back.
Hell, they probably could have bought @ajcc 's whole field for the £250K!!!
And they talk about us having to do things for the "Public Good". Complete and utter madness. They are a bunch of delusional hippoctrites!!

 

[Ffermer Bach]

shouldn't the public accounts committee be looking into these £250 000 legal bills, it sounds a scandal to me, far worse than any expenses for duck house payments!

 

[Bongodog]

Oh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....

The problem is that its not their money they are wasting, if they had to find it out of their pocket it would be very different

 

[ajcc]

The other person in charge at the Post Office at the time was Tim Brooks, now top of the tree at the National Trust. Rather ironic don't you think?A finer example of the lesser spotted fffing idiot you could not wish to meet. Enough said.

“Tim Parker?”wouldn’t want to muddy the wrong name!

 

[ollie989898]

As I have said I am aware of various farmers who have spoken at length of their 'issues' over the years with these various organisations/quangos mentioned and it would make me extremely hesitant to ever enter into any kind of agreement with them. The crux of it is that at their core these folk do not like/want farming anywhere and don't see the 'need' for it. They believe you are all a gang of yokels who get kicks out of raping the environment and ruining it whilst making lot of money most of the time. The bulk of them are folk with ecology degrees who survive solely on responsibly sourced soya-lattes and feel empowered only by their self-importance.

If it was myself who, as senior manager of the region involved, I'd have taken a pragmatic approach with an example like AJCC's and come to some kind of end result that suited both parties. I suspect what has happened here is that an individual has taken issue with AJCC and they have used their position to snowball the case into a nearly ridiculous legal challenge which the organisation now can't back out of because they would look very stupid given the money involved.

Ask yourself how a 250K+ bill for legal fees is in any way proportionate to the overall value of the claim/scheme that was entered into? How many acres did the public gain the benefit of and for how long? I bet it isn't worth 250K of anyone's money.

We all know that if you established a 100% totally pukka wildflower meadow on a patch of otherwise entirely productive farmland it won't ever remain that way because native/weed species would arrive eventually and recolonise it.

If the field above was mine I would chain harrow the life out of it and put it back to a long term ley with a fertiliser spreader. It's basically bare dirt now anyway and all this rain will get the new ley away.

 

[Banana Bar]

Its the same con that the forestry commission has used for "compensation for turning good farmland into trees". Once you take the money and plant the trees they change the rules so that they no longer have to pay the compensation and you cannot get rid of the trees.

I wouldn’t plant large numbers of trees unless the payment was similar or greater than its freehold value. Why would you?

BB

 

[steveR]

I wouldn’t plant large numbers of trees unless the payment was similar or greater than its freehold value. Why would you?

BB

And a one-off payment, or over a VERY short time scale, say 3 years! No more that 5 or 10 year committment of management either.