Farmers in England will get new payments for cleaning up the waterways near their land, the environment secretary has said.
Agricultural pollution affects 40% of Britain’s lakes and rivers, as fertiliser and animal waste washes off the land into waterways.
Speaking at the National Farmers’ Union water summit at Beeston Hall farm in West Yorkshire, Steve Reed said his department would be launching changes to the sustainable farming incentive (SFI) scheme that replaced EU subsidies. The SFI, which pays farmers to look after the environment, was frozen this year in a surprise move. The scheme is expected to reopen next year.
Reed said: “We also have to work with the farming sector to tackle pollution from agriculture. We are looking at how we can reform SFI so that when it opens in the new year there will be more actions in there focused on cleaning up water, because that’s in the interests of the country as a whole, but it’s also in the interests of the farming sector. So we’ll have more to say on that.”
He is expected to launch these changes by the end of summer.
The NFU announced it was starting a new programme that would work with scientists to help farmers measure the pollution in the waterways near their farms, so they could take steps to improve the water quality and see the progress.
The summit was held on the NFU vice-president Rachel Hallos’s farm. On her land, which is owned by Yorkshire Water, there are two reservoirs. Reed toured these and saw they were completely dry, which has raised concerns about water supply and food production in the area. Yorkshire was the first area of the UK to implement a hosepipe ban this summer. It is in drought after the driest spring on record.
The NFU president, Tom Bradshaw, said farmers were having to deal with weather extremes due to climate breakdown. He added: “I think that, rather than being extreme, that is now the reality that we’re all having to deal with, and that as farmers, we’ve got to work out how we can mitigate the risk, how we can try and manage the situation so that we don’t lurch from one catastrophic problem of not being able to plant out crops, then them flooding, or not having enough fodder because we haven’t had the rainfall.”
Reed suggested he might make it easier for farmers to build reservoirs on their land to hold water during dry conditions. He said planning had been “too slow”, adding: “Farmers can’t get on and build reservoirs that they need.”
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He said: “Farmers get caught in the planning system. We’ve done work with the National Trust and RSPB where they are trusted partners and they don’t have to apply for permission to dig ponds on their land any more. We aren’t quite there yet with farmers we are coproducing policy but something could look like that.
“There isn’t just one answer – we need farmers to be able to have ready access to water and that involves many different actions we could take. That’s why it’s so important to have conversations like those we are having today.”
