Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
In the interest of the new found drive to not hive off potentially important topics into sub-folders, which in turn reduces visibility, I thought I'd stick to the main section with this post.
This video (
) links quite nicely with Alan Savory's talk a while back (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI) by reaffirming the chronic decline of humus and organic matter (still need to properly learn the difference between the two) in the world's soils, and also by highlighting the consequences of this decline and the ways to reverse it. Well of course readers of this section of TFF knew that anyway so the above hardly constitutes news but good at least to see it entering the public domain, albeit in a small way.
One of my reactions to the video was that the difference in the wider impact of a farmer who is destroying their soil and one is who actually improving it is really quite large. OK the differing levels of humus in the soil will impact on the individual farmer by directly affecting their profitability (as claimed in the video) but the destructive farmer does not pay the price for the wider impact she / he causes - that is, the effect on waterways, decline in nutritional quality of food, impact upon the climate, biodiversity and the usage of chemicals which adversely affect human health et cetera.
Now any hope that we can quickly start, individually and in each case, to put a price on these factors, which are currently valueless, is probably rather fanciful. It does seem to me, however, that there is an indirect way to at least begin to roughly price these effects en masse and, also, that an opportunity current presents itself to pursue this avenue of possibility. I refer to the current renegotiation of the CAP and in particular to the quite significant tranches of money that will be reserved for 'greening measures'.
I, for one, will be mightily annoyed if we have to have 7% of our land sitting around doing nothing or actually declining in quality each year because this will literally not be green in any way shape or form. My displeasure would be mollified considerably if that 7% could be used to do something useful, namely grow a cover crop, and I would even be pleased if the value of such an activity was recognised by some form of greening payment. Far better to pay people to do the right thing rather than the reverse.
The second area, which relates more closely to the thread title and continues the sentiment expressed in the last sentence, is to do with financial incentives for no-till. It seems that current flat rate subsidy levels in my area (I make no comment about the livestock side about which I am largely ignorant), and certainly on our farm, are sufficiently high to permit highly inefficient farming with a vast surplus of tractors and machinery, much to the joy of the machinery sales people who get to charge 'UK prices'. Again, what is the point of paying people to do the wrong thing, or rather paying people enough that they have the luxury of profiting whilst doing the wrong thing? Now I'm not advocating some sort of tillage directive which legislates against the ownership of ploughs - if someone wants to plough that's their prerogative but there's no moral requirement on the part of the taxpayer to subside an often recreational and damaging activity. The story of the American farmer who no-tills because that's what the bank manager dictates is not an entirely sad story.
The further problem is that I'm not convinced that just lowering subsidies across the board will drive a huge change towards no-till; it ought to but I'm not sure it would. The reason is highlighted in Knockie's report that all of this neighbours think him to be mentally deficient; in other words some people would rather sell up or go bust ploughing than admit that their cranky neighbour actually wasn't so crazy after all. I think, given the outline of the CAP reforms that we've seen, that a portion of the greening payments should be targeted toward conservation / regenerative (prefer this word) agriculture. That way the politicians can actually say that the CAP money is actually paying for a useful and beneficial service rendered to the public (might actually allow them to hit their 2020 targets which they'll otherwise probably fail to meet) rather than simply paying for my farm to buy its seventh plough even though none would do.
So, if you're wondering what to do with yourself before harvest and you believe that the influence of the individual is not precisely zero, you ought to bend the ear of your local NFU person, Natural England person etc. and try and prevent a bungling of the upcoming reforms.
Here endeth my Saturday rant.
This video (
One of my reactions to the video was that the difference in the wider impact of a farmer who is destroying their soil and one is who actually improving it is really quite large. OK the differing levels of humus in the soil will impact on the individual farmer by directly affecting their profitability (as claimed in the video) but the destructive farmer does not pay the price for the wider impact she / he causes - that is, the effect on waterways, decline in nutritional quality of food, impact upon the climate, biodiversity and the usage of chemicals which adversely affect human health et cetera.
Now any hope that we can quickly start, individually and in each case, to put a price on these factors, which are currently valueless, is probably rather fanciful. It does seem to me, however, that there is an indirect way to at least begin to roughly price these effects en masse and, also, that an opportunity current presents itself to pursue this avenue of possibility. I refer to the current renegotiation of the CAP and in particular to the quite significant tranches of money that will be reserved for 'greening measures'.
I, for one, will be mightily annoyed if we have to have 7% of our land sitting around doing nothing or actually declining in quality each year because this will literally not be green in any way shape or form. My displeasure would be mollified considerably if that 7% could be used to do something useful, namely grow a cover crop, and I would even be pleased if the value of such an activity was recognised by some form of greening payment. Far better to pay people to do the right thing rather than the reverse.
The second area, which relates more closely to the thread title and continues the sentiment expressed in the last sentence, is to do with financial incentives for no-till. It seems that current flat rate subsidy levels in my area (I make no comment about the livestock side about which I am largely ignorant), and certainly on our farm, are sufficiently high to permit highly inefficient farming with a vast surplus of tractors and machinery, much to the joy of the machinery sales people who get to charge 'UK prices'. Again, what is the point of paying people to do the wrong thing, or rather paying people enough that they have the luxury of profiting whilst doing the wrong thing? Now I'm not advocating some sort of tillage directive which legislates against the ownership of ploughs - if someone wants to plough that's their prerogative but there's no moral requirement on the part of the taxpayer to subside an often recreational and damaging activity. The story of the American farmer who no-tills because that's what the bank manager dictates is not an entirely sad story.
The further problem is that I'm not convinced that just lowering subsidies across the board will drive a huge change towards no-till; it ought to but I'm not sure it would. The reason is highlighted in Knockie's report that all of this neighbours think him to be mentally deficient; in other words some people would rather sell up or go bust ploughing than admit that their cranky neighbour actually wasn't so crazy after all. I think, given the outline of the CAP reforms that we've seen, that a portion of the greening payments should be targeted toward conservation / regenerative (prefer this word) agriculture. That way the politicians can actually say that the CAP money is actually paying for a useful and beneficial service rendered to the public (might actually allow them to hit their 2020 targets which they'll otherwise probably fail to meet) rather than simply paying for my farm to buy its seventh plough even though none would do.
So, if you're wondering what to do with yourself before harvest and you believe that the influence of the individual is not precisely zero, you ought to bend the ear of your local NFU person, Natural England person etc. and try and prevent a bungling of the upcoming reforms.
Here endeth my Saturday rant.
