Farmers get blamed for destroying nature and causing climate change when they’re literally working all hours to feed us. In fact, farmers stand in the front line in the battle with real and political climate change with unpredictable weather patterns, stress and worry for future, lack of staff, rising costs of imports and exports and border bureaucracy due to Brexit. Yet, most farmers identify themselves as the guardians of our nature, wildlife and ancient connections to the land, and are in fact often the first ones to embrace new ways of living and working to maintain biodiversity. In many areas farming has dramatically changed in the last decades to enable more cost-effective farming, and often ways of the family farm have been lost in search of profit. Often, but not always, maintaining biodiversity or looking after our insects and bees has not been priority – understandably so. When the masses demand ever cheaper food and supermarkets are dominating the food industry, we can’t blame the farmers. We must blame ourselves. If we want farmers to have time, energy, and resources to produce climate and wildlife friendly food produce, we must demand it, but most importantly, we must be willing to pay for it. We can’t expect to pay pennies for dairy products in supermarkets, yet demand farmers to improve animal welfare standards, spend money on infrastructure to improve to reduce slurry waste, or time for looking after wildlife on their land. If we paid a higher price for farm products, especially dairy and meat, farmers could make a living with smaller herds, and have resources to increase welfare standards or protect and conserve wildlife. Alternatively, or better yet, adding to this, we could develop a nature workforce to help the farming community whilst creating connections to the land, and our food and relearning regenerative practices.
The Office of the Future Generations Commissioner has proposed a National Nature Service (NNS). An ambitious new program for Welsh Government. It highlights some innovative, some basic and some tried and tested ways to achieve greener, healthier, more equitable, wellbeing Wales. The NNS would increase resources for conservation, whilst creating jobs, apprenticeships, and volunteer placements to increase skills and build capacity for restoring habitats and wildlife and mitigate against adverse effects of climate change. I argue that we should start with farming.
Nature needs space. Farmland can be (and already often is!) that space. A whopping 88% of land in Wales is farmland (2019 Senedd report). The rest is built areas, houses, industries, roads, urban green spaces and wild nature. Wales has ambitious plans for generating more forested and wild areas. Farmland is the natural solution for rapidly increasing wild places, restoring biodiversity, and creating buffer zones for keeping our waterways clean from farm effluents. Widening hedges and using edges of existing fields for woodland, shrubbery, grassland and meadows will add a significant amount of natural space without hugely compromising grazing space. All these are hugely important for wildlife, but their creation and management takes time and money. At the moment large companies are buying land from farmers for carbon offset businesses. This is not going to help us, or the farming community. Firstly carbon offsets are notoriously difficult and tend to create a false impression that it is OK to keep emitting carbon as long as it is offset. We all know that it is not. Yes we need to plant trees, but we need to plant them in the right places, supporting local communities and local jobs, not to create profit in far away pockets. And other habitats are crucial too.
Many people have lost the connection to the land, and most importantly to the food they eat. People need to re-connect, learn new skills, and find new jobs. Nature friendly farming can provide some of these jobs, volunteer placements and apprenticeships. Nature restoration needs resources. So does future farming. Modern farming is machine heavy and employs relatively few people. Climate change mitigation and adaptation calls for regenerative farming methods, which will need more resources. People migrated away from rural areas as more and more land area was turned into intensively farmed monocultures. Reversing this will need to bring the people back. And in the meantime, our farmers will still need to provide us the food we eat – whilst phasing out fossil fuels and regenerating nature and staying sane. The rest of us need to be willing to pay a living wage to our farmers and make farming pay.
A Welsh Natural Nature service could help with this transition. More resources could help farmers focus on low carbon, ethically produced local produce, and create a system that pays a decent wage to farmers, whilst connecting people to the land, promoting nature friendly, regenerative farming practices. And yes, this is not the only solution, we also need to tackle supermarkets, unfair subsidies, and the conundrum of transition away from fossil fuels in rural areas - but providing a system where people are given opportunities to connect not just to wild nature but to the part of nature that provides us with our food will significantly improve our collective understanding of how we are all interconnected.
Image credits CreativeCommons.org.