Lowestoft farmer implores officials to review subsidy system

Government attitudes to agricultural production came under fire at a special meeting for farmers which was hosted by Suffolk Coastal MP Thérèse Coffey.

Former National Farmers' Union Suffolk branch chairman John Collen - who farms about 2,500 acres at Gisleham, near Lowestoft - took officials to task about what he viewed as a lack of reward for productive farmers in post-Brexit farm schemes - now heavily geared towards environmental improvements.

"The pendulum has swung entirely the wrong way," he said. "I employ directly 12 families - where are they going to create their income from?"

The farmers' meeting - at the Riverside Centre at Stratford St Andrew, near Saxmundham on Friday, January 26 - was aimed at showing them how they can access Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI) and other government funding.

They got to grill top officials including Sandy Kapila, head of external affairs at the Rural Payments Agency, and John Place , head of Countryside Stewardship and Environmental Stewardship at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), who lives in Suffolk. Also in the line-up was Joanna Wright, nature recovery project manager at Natural England.

The officials laid out some of the help available and improvements made to help farmers access funding faster and more efficiently. But Mr Collen was critical of the approach to food production.

"We are on our knees," he said. "SFI will not create jobs for my staff. They will become unemployed."

While he thought aspects of SFI were "good", they did not address the need to produce food in the UK, he argued.

"Nobody on the stage today has talked about production," he said. If that wasn't meant to form part of future government plans "let us know and let us prepare for that and we can walk away," he said. "There's not the money in productive agriculture to stay."

He added: "I implore you to have a mid-term review and just look at productive agriculture. It's in a sorry state."

He pointed to the huge difficulties caused by the wet autumn for the 2023 harvest and the flooding seen since. These had put "more stress on farmers than I have ever seen", he said.

"Don't underestimate how many jobs will be lost from food production," he said.

Oliver Holloway of Framlingham land agents Clarke and Simpson said there was "nothing" about food production in the schemes. Farmers and landowners faced "the unknown of what you are trying to achieve in terms of food production", he added.

Dr Coffey said it was important to note that we also needed a better environment. "They are not in conflict," she said. She pointed out that under the EU Common Agricultural Policy's Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) - which in the last throes of being phased out - "half the money was going to just 10% of landowners".

Afterwards she added that government money had never been used to pay people to produce food. "There's definitely a future in food production. What I'm conscious of is this transition is proving uncomfortable to people," she said.

"Some of it is on environmental schemes and some is on farm transformation.

"That's why I want to make sure there are still opportunities for farmers to get money from the government. £2.4bn on average a year is being paid into the farming industry."

Mr Kapila said they were "feeding it (their feedback) into the policy thinking". "The intention is not to take good agricultural land out of production," he said.

Sir Michael Bunbury, of Naunton Hall, Rendlesham, near Woodbridge, criticised the state of rivers - especially the River Deben. Phosphate levels coming out of the sewage works were much too high, he claimed. "It used to be full of life - it's not now," he said.

Other farmers raised the issue of collaboration between farmers, which they felt wasn't recognised or rewarded properly. One pointed out the problems involved in applying for funding for a "shared" hedgerow with a neighbouring landowner.

Officials said schemes were still being developed and were in a transitional period. "I don't expect you to see the final offer until 2025/26," said Mr Kapila.

Mr Place added: "We do try and listen to farmers. We have to roll these things out and make them work better. There's a constant improvement cycle that involves talking to farmers."