Farming Today
24/09/2024 Labour Party conference, solar farm inquiry, bluetongue, cider apples
The Labour Party conference is underway in Liverpool. Last week we heard from the Liberal Democrats and next week we'll report on the Conservative Party conference. Agriculture is a devolved issue, so the budget and how it's spent is up to governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Steve Reed spoke at the Labour conference. He told us a land use framework will be published before Christmas, but details of funding for farmers will have to waiting until the chancellor's autumn budget.
All week we're hearing how plans for new infrastructure are affecting farmers and their land. A row over whether farm land in North Yorkshire should be turned into a solar farm is going before a public inquiry. The tenant farmers at Eden Farm, Old Malton say a solar farm would make their business unviable. The developer says it’s listened to feedback, and reduced the solar farm’s size by a third.
The number of cases of bluetongue disease in cattle and sheep has risen to 97. As a result the restriction zone has been redrawn and now covers all Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, all Greater London, Surrey and West Sussex. Previous restrictions in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and East Yorkshire remain in place.
Apple growers tell us how the weather this year's affected them. One cider producer in Somerset says he's lost trees because of waterlogged orchards and the yield is way down.
Presenter = Anna Hill Producer = Rebecca Rooney
- Duration:
- 16m
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, it's Emma Hill here with The Farming Today podcast. Today, more wet weather. We hear how it's affecting the side at Apple Harvest. Our planning week continues as a public inquiry starts into a solar farm on tenanted land. And Labor's defra secretary tells me he won't make any commitments on increasing funding for farming in England until the Chancellor's budget. First a day with amber warnings for rain across Central and Western England over the last 24 hours. We're back onto one of our favourite topics, the weather. Last year has been extremely challenging for all food producers, and this year's Apple Harvest, which is just underway, has been feeling the effects. According to Avalon Fresh, a wholesaler which supplies supermarkets, this year's yield is good, but fruit sizes are variable because pollination at blossom time took three weeks rather than one, as cold, wet weather affected both the blossom and the pollinators. Some apples have also suffered from scab and others have had a russeting caused by wind damage. In parts of the country where floods occurred, the trees themselves have been damaged. Nick Showering is director of Showering Cider in Somerset. Well, this year has been an incredibly difficult one. We've had one of the wettest winters on record last winter, which has meant that our trees have really suffered. We've actually lost trees, a percentage of them have died unfortunately. What it means for the remainder of the trees is that the soil gets totally soaked and sodden, and the roots really struggle. So it's a lack of oxygen that gets the trees, and they really struggle to yield a good amount of fruit in the following harvest season. And so it was really, really tough winter. It then progressed into spring, and unfortunately this season, because of the winter, there wasn't very much blossom at all. That was actually made even worse by the bad spring that we had, where we had additional more rain and more wind, which then knocks some of the buds off. And those buds are what turns eventually into apples. And then on top of that, we had quite a lot of blossom weevils, which come along in a bad for the blossom. It was really three things, which have meant we're going to be very low on apples this year. What about the apples themselves? What is the orchard looking like? It's quite a sorry sight actually, and it's very sad for me to see, because every harvest season I'm always walking around the orchids, and it's normally full to the brim of apples. But this year, you actually have to find the apples almost, so you're walking around in some trees, you've got a totally bare. So it is quite a sorry and sad sight at the moment, but there aren't many, but they are still of a high quality, which is good. We are going to slightly struggle for the 2024 vintage. Fortunately, we can draw on older vintages, so we're a triple vintage cider, and our cider is a blend of three vintages or years. And so for our upcoming batches that we make, we're going to have to draw quite heavily on our older vintages, because there might not be enough of the 2024. The appropriately named Nick showering. The number of cases of blue tongue disease in cattle and sheep, as of Sunday, has now risen to 97. As a result, the restriction zone has been redrawn, and now covers all of Lincolnshire, Cambridge, Beffordshire, Hertfordshire, all greater London, Surrey and West Sussex. Previous restrictions in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and East Yorkshire remain in place. Now, all week we're hearing how plans for new infrastructure are affecting farmers and their land. A row over whether part of a tenanted farm in North Yorkshire should be turned into a solar farm will go before a public increase. The tenant farmers at Eden Farm, Old Moulton, say a solar farm would make their business unviable. The developer Harmony Energy says it's listened to feedback and reduced the solar farm size by a third BBC North Yorkshire political reporter Richard Edwards reports. Tenant farmer Rob Sturdy is the third generation of his family to work Eden Farm at Old Moulton, and he fears he'll be the last. That's because Harmony Energy has applied to build a solar farm on a large part of Rob's 280 tenanted acres, a plan that was thrown out by local councillors last October. If the inspector does grant this application, it will be a complete struggle. The remaining farmland would barely produce enough straw for the livestock that we have on the farm. When we need all that straw for winter bedding and feed, it would be very difficult. I don't want this to become the last harvest. Harmony's working with the owners of the Sturdy's Farm, the Fitzwilliam Trust Corporation, limited on the solar farm application. The Sturdy's say they first heard of it in 2020 and the last four years have hit their mental health. Here's Rob's wife Emma Sturdy. It's taken over our lives completely. I mean, it's every day, it's a full-time job, it's incredibly stressful, it's incredibly expensive as well. Eden Farm finds its future tied in with the UK's future energy policy. Energy Secretary and Doncaster MP Ed Miliband says he wants to quadruple UK solar power, which he says will help fight climate change and bring economic growth and new jobs. Frances Nichols, sir, is one of Harmony Energy's directors. After detailed design and assessment work, we managed to refine the site design down to about 52 hectares, which is the application that we're left with now. With the development, we need to be as close as possible to the point of connection, so that's next door at molten bulk supply point. That invariably has to take some agricultural land out of production, but we've worked really hard to refine the site down to utilise the poorest performing land in the area. North Yorkshire, with its miles of open land and countryside, will play a key role in two of the Labour government's big policy. It pushes house building and solar energy. There's a number of applications for solar farms. This one, at Old Molten, there's another 35 miles away at Campbell's with me, a Selby. Byron Ward is from the Holt's Selby Area Solar Farm campaign. We seem to be rushing into it in a very blanket attitude, just putting these great big solar farms everywhere without taking a step back to consider other options, such as if we put them on houses, we're building 200,000 houses every year. If we put a four kilowatt array on every single house, you can do the maths. It's an enormous amount of energy by doing that. It's a lot more than just taking swathe of countryside out of prime agricultural use, just to plonk a load of solar panels on. It's crazy. The Campbell's have planned is in the hands of the government's planning inspectorate. The firm behind it, Ensos Energy, says that as a nationally significant infrastructure project, the scheme underwent a thorough review process. As the Labour government presses on with its programme, this debate, which puts prized countryside in with the push to cut climate change and people's bills, is far from being settled. BBC North Yorkshire political reporter Richard Edwards, well, as we just heard their planning, is just one of the topics up for discussion at the Labour Party Conference, which is underway in Liverpool. Last week we heard from the Liberal Democrats. Next week we'll report on the Conservative Party Conference. Agriculture is a devolved issue, so the budget and how it's spent is up to individual legislators in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. So today we're covering what Labour is saying about the future for farming in England. In England, the environmental land management scheme, or ELMS, replaces the old payments from the EU, known as BPS. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Steve Reed, spoke at the Labour Conference yesterday and told delegates he'll stop sewage pollution in rivers and... We'll back our farmers in the fantastic work they do to feed our nation, and we'll work with them to restore nature and stop animal waste fertiliser and pesticide pollution running into our waterways. We'll protect bees, butterflies and the pollinators that sustain healthy ecosystems. We'll plant more trees along our river banks to help the land hold more water and stop flooding. And we'll plant three new national forests as we restore the woodlands that are the lungs of our planet in hailing carbon and breathing out clean air. But the crucial subject, which Mr Reed didn't speak about, is funding. The agriculture budget, which goes to farmers in England, is £2.4 billion, but recently it was revealed that there was an underspend of £358 million in the Defra budget over the last three years. Farmers believe that some will not be regained and the budget could be reduced. I spoke to Steve Reed just after the Chancellor's speech and before he addressed the conference and asked him, are farmers in England going to get more money or less? Announcements like that happen in the budget, so I'm afraid everybody's going to have to wait until the budget until we hear the details. How hard have you been pressing the Chancellor and making the case that farmers want you to make for increasing the budget? Well, I see it as absolutely my job to fight farmers' corner through the spending review, and that's what I've been doing. Of course, we have to all recognise the appalling financial inheritance that we had from the previous Conservative government. That notwithstanding, then of course I'm fighting farmers' corner through the spending review. And the Labour message from the conference is about growth, but I suppose farmers would argue that you can't have economic growth without investment, and that's what they want to see in farming. That's right, absolutely. We want to bring in investment, but it's particularly private sector investment that we need to attract. So as part of our New Deal for farmers, we're looking at how we can support farming to become more investable, a more attractive investment prospect. And by dealing with the huge costs that have really damaged farmers, we're looking at what we can do to cut energy bills. By moving to a clean energy economy, setting up GB energy to drive the investment there, we can harness the power of wind wave, solar and nuclear, and cut farmers' energy bills. But we can also, by planting through the planning reforms, make it easier for farmers to invest in their own clean energy and wire it up to the grid faster. So we're looking through the new planning and infrastructure bill to speed up those kind of decisions. So you're talking about this New Deal in relation to energy, but what about New Deal on growing food? Is that included in your plans? Well, the New Deal for farmers supports farming to make their businesses more sustainable into the future financially, as well as environmentally. So we're looking at government procurement for food. For instance, we want 50% of government food procurement to be British produce. That puts money directly into the pockets of British farmers. We've already started talking in cabinets about seeking a new veterinary deal with the European Union so that we can get good British food exports moving into the European markets. So it's not just one single measure. We're looking into a whole approach to support farmers to make farming more profitable and viable and investable for the future. The image that many country dwellers might have of labour now is a planning free for all, allowing massive solar farms, building on Greenbelt land. How do you make sure there's a balance between food, environment, housing and energy? That's such an important question because what you're describing is what we currently have. It is a free for all. So what we intend to do is publish a land use framework. We're hoping to publish that this side of Christmas that then would then be a 12 week consultation period. And just on the sustainable farming incentive, I mean, it's a pretty complex system, isn't it? A lot of farmers have said that the opportunity hasn't arisen for them yet to join in. Well, the system is continuing as it was, so of course farmers can put in their funding bids and their funding requests as normal. We're not going to overturn the apple cart on this. I think there's been far too much change already in how many of these environmental and land management schemes were operating. We want the system to bed in. We want to increase take up of those schemes. It was very disappointing that some of those elm schemes that the previous government said that they were making available to farmers. They didn't actually get the money out of the door in the end. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? You know, we know that £358 million was underspent over three years. Is that money now gone? Is that money going to be in the budget for agriculture or not? Well, it's so disappointing because, you know, as the... Can you tell me yes or no? I mean, those decisions will be looked at through the spending review, and that's the right and proper thing to do. But I want to make absolutely sure that when we commit to make a budget available for farmers, farmers can get it and can use it for the purposes that it's intended for it. Defra Secretary of State Steve Reed in Liverpool. That's all from us. I'm Anna Hill. The producer is Rebecca Rooney. Farming today is a BBC audio Bristol production. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with a team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages, and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy, and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Mega Con Orlando is the largest Comic Con event that we produce in the US. 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