Farming Today

27/09/24 - Henry Dimbleby, dead Scottish salmon, underground energy cables

We’ve been reporting over the last couple of weeks about a £358m underspend over the last three years from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' £2.4 billion agriculture annual budget for England. Farmers are furious at the scale of this underspend and there are concerns that the money will be lost for good in cuts in this autumn’s government spending review. Now a former Defra director says it’s critical that this money isn’t lost from the farming budget. Henry Dimbleby was Defra’s lead non-executive board member for five years up until spring last year when he resigned over what he said was the then Government’s failure to tackle obesity, something he’d highlighted as a priority in his independent National Food Strategy, commissioned by the Government.

An animal welfare charity says it's filmed tonnes of dead and dying salmon being removed from a fish farm just hours before Members of the Scottish Parliament visited the site for a fact finding mission. Holyrood's Rural Affairs committee visited Dunstaffnage fish farm near Oban on Monday as part of their inquiry into whether the industry's made progress in tackling significant environmental concerns. The campaign group Animal Equality has accused the industry of trying to cover up the fish deaths, but Scottish Sea Farms who own the farm, says the workers were carrying out routine clearance of the pens.

The need for clean energy has led to a large increase in offshore wind farms and electricity generated in them has to be brought inland. That means hundreds of miles of underground cabling is being channelled through the countryside with some farmers having little choice about whether they go across their land.

Presented by Caz Graham and produced by Beatrice Fenton.

Broadcast on:: 27 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

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Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy, and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit Claude.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the Farming Today podcast. In this edition, will thousands of dead and dying salmon removed from a Scottish fish farm to hide them from members of the Scottish Parliament, or as part of routine work? And the £380 million to spend on agriculture by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs must be retained in its budget. So says former Defra non-executive director and author of England's National Food Strategy, Henry Dimbelby. The key thing is the battle with the Treasury. If Treasury take that money back, this hard-won trust with the farming communities will be lost. First, though, this week we have been taking an in-depth look at planning on farmland and in rural areas. That might sound a bit dry, but it's actually been rather fascinating. The need for clean energy has led to a large increase in offshore wind farms and electricity generated in them has to be brought in land. That means hundreds of miles of underground cabling is being channeled through the countryside with some farmers having little choice about whether they go across their land. Energy companies offer compensation to farmers and organisations like ADAS and Agricultural Consultancy are supporting them through the process. In East Anglia, the energy company, Orsted, owned by the Danish Government, is burying cables to transport electricity from the enormous Hornsey Three wind farm in the North Sea to Tilbury in Essex. Many of them pass through Norfolk. Anna Hill has this report from Repum North of Norwich. You might have seen these areas of building work across fields and wondered what they're for, like a big road being built. These are areas which are being prepared ready to bring in electricity cables to put under the ground to bring in offshore energy. And with me is Ed Jones. We're contract farmers and just an all-arable operation growing a range of crops. We also have Jane Kenny with us from ADAS. These projects are known as National Significant Infrastructure Projects. So the developer is required to make an application called the Development Consent Order, which is the equivalent of a planning permission. Does anyone have the right to say, "Actually, I don't want this on my land." If the developer is successful and is granted their DCO, they will have compulsory acquisition powers. Part of the DCO process also is that they have to engage with stakeholders and landowners and try and reach a voluntary agreement. Is it really voluntary? That is a very good question. It is called a voluntary agreement, but with the backdrop that the developer has the compulsory acquisition powers if they are unable to reach agreement. So you always find that you do reach a ceiling where you are subsequently got a gun held to your head so that they will use those powers if we don't agree with what they're offering. Just standing here on this field, the amount of disruption is quite surprising, isn't it? There are these large banks that have been built up either side, and then you've got this large roadway. How long is it going through your land? Probably about a mile and a bit. And how much land have you lost to this development which you would normally crop? Well, we're standing in a 30 hectare field at the moment and we're now cropping 22 hectares in just this particular field. What is the compensation then that you receive? Well, I get a sort of payment for them taking ownership of the cable underneath, and then I also get a payment for not being able to farm it. And then severed areas which are small areas that are unfeasible for the equipment to go into, we get a crop loss on that area as well. The majority of farmers recognise the need for more energy, and are happy as not the right word, but accept that they are in a position to be able to facilitate that. And all that they ask in return is that their land is returned in the best possible condition. I understand that we need energy and more of it than we currently have, but I'm hoping that in five to ten years' time we'll settle down and no one will know it's here. That would be the perfect goal. Whereas if it was a pylon, we'd be swearing about it the rest of my lifetime. Farmer Ed Jones in Norfolk. An animal welfare charity says it's filmed tons of dead and dying salmon being removed from a fish farm just hours before members of the Scottish Parliament visited the site for a fact-finding mission. Hollywood's Rural Affairs Committee visited Dunstafnage Fish Farm near open on Monday as part of their inquiry into whether the industry's made progress in tackling significant environmental concerns. The campaign group Animal Equality has accused the industry of trying to cover up the fish deaths, but Scottish sea farms who run the farm say that the workers were carrying out routine clearance of the pens. BBC Scotland's environment correspondent Kevin Keen joins us now. Kevin, just talk us through what this footage shows. Well, as this footage is shot long distance and it's shot from the mainland looking out towards the Dunstafnage Fish Farm, and what it shows in the images is a support vessel up against the pens of the fish farm with a big crane on it and then two huge yellow bins on board. And what you see is a large net hanging from that crane scooping up the dead and dying fish and dropping them into those two disposal bins. And it does that several times. The campaign group which filmed it Animal Equality UK says tons and tons of fish, and then you see in the same footage a bit later on in the day, the same location, just a few hours later, the MSP is arriving on a small rib, stepping out onto that large, that same larger support vessel, no tubs of dead fish there anymore by this time, and then asking and answering questions from company representatives there. Now Animal Equality UK says that it's clear that the area was cleaned up to paint the industry in a good light. What does the fish farm operator have to say about it then? Well they insist cows that what the footage shows is routine clearance of dead fish from the pens, and they say that that's something that happens daily, that the number of dead fish that they remove can vary from pen to pen and from day to day, but they insist that this was not what's called a mass mortality event. Hundreds rather than thousands of fish involved they say, and that issue of mass mortality is something that the industry has really been struggling with for years now, with diseases or parasites spreading rapidly through quite densely populated fish stocks, and sea lice of course has been the main one that we've been talking about for many years, but more recently we've started seeing problems with micro jellyfish, and we know from Scottish government figures that 17.4 million fish died on fish farms last year alone, and that's a record number. Now Ronnie Souter is the head of veterinary services at Scottish Sea Farms, who co-hosted the MSPs on Monday, and he says the number of dead fish removed was nothing unusual. This is a committee of MSPs, since the beginning of me being looking into salmon farming, the idea that they don't really know what's going on or could be easily fooled by us, I think it's a bit insulting to them, and we were really open. Okay, and have we heard anything from the Rural Affairs Committee who were visiting the farm? Well they had a committee meeting on Wednesday morning, and they understand that the footage was discussed in private session afterwards. We've had a statement from a spokesperson for the committee, which says that they've heard concerns about fish mortality during a wide range of evidence taken throughout their inquiry, and, and this is the important bit, they say that this footage raises further questions for the committee. Now the green MSP Ariane Burgess is on the committee, and she says that there needs to be more transparency. What we're trying to do is ensure that salmon farming across Scotland works really well in terms of what they do with the environment, their animal health and welfare, and also how they communicate with communities. So, you know, we will be asking them those questions, and I want those answers around this footage before we get to that committee session. Now the MSP's had that fact-finding site visit on Monday, and they did it to prepare themselves for an appearance before them at Holyrood next week of representatives of the salmon farming sector, and of course in the light of this footage, I think there are going to be some uncomfortable questions for them to answer. Thank you very much, that's Kevin Keene, BBC Scotland's Environment Correspondent. Now we have been reporting over the last couple of weeks about a £350 million underspend over the last three years from Defra's 2.4 billion agriculture annual budget for England. Farmers are furious at the scale of this underspend, and there are concerns that the money could be lost for good in cuts in this autumn's government spending review. Now a former Defra director says it's critical that this money isn't lost from the farming budget. Henry Dimbleby was Defra's lead non-executive board member for five years, up until spring last year when he resigned over what he said was the then-government's failure to tackle obesity, something that he highlighted as a priority in his independent National Food Strategy, commissioned by the government. While I've been speaking with Henry Dimbleby about the Defra budget, but first I asked him what he makes of the new government's approach to food policy. On the environmental side I'm really encouraged, so what Steve Reed has said about the land use framework coming in, I've heard that the land use framework is going to really look into some of the very difficult issues about how we use land for farming, for energy, for nature, for carbon sequestration. So I just really hope that they can launch that in a way that shows a future for all stakeholders, because if we can get that right we can actually completely transform the way in which we farm our countryside and create sustainable lives for farmers. I mean there's one thing I really hope to see, which is a bit of vision for the uplands, because the uplands farmers, they have probably been, a lot of those small farmers, will be the ones that have been a bit left behind so far with the reforms, and I don't think it's too late. I've spoken to the civil servants since I definitely know what they're doing, and I really hope that the land use strategy has a strong positive vision for those communities. Well we've been speaking to a late and open farmer just this week on farming today, who really feels kind of left in limbo to be honest by the environmental land management schemes. I mean were you able to get any kind of hints from the Secretary of State, and I know that you've spoken to the Secretary of State and the ministers, and your zeitner over the last week or so, are you able to glean from them if there is good news on the horizon for upland farmers? I think there's a real problem with the way in which this is being done. It's a complex system and so you have to do it a little bit piecemeal, see how things respond. So a lot of farmers say we want a five or ten year certainty, but if you gave that you wouldn't get it right. So I think the way that they are doing it is right. I don't think they should feel, from the noise that I'm getting, they shouldn't feel they've been forgotten. It's just taken a bit more time to get it right. The key thing though, the key thing is the battle with the treasury. I always thought if this money didn't get in the ground soon enough, there would be this problem that treasury might take it back, and it would be absolutely disastrous. If treasury take that money back, it'll... Defra will struggle to get the right money to the upland communities, and to be frank, this hard-won trust with the farming communities will be lost. So that is really come budget day. That's what I am. I think if we can keep the £2.4 billion then I'm hopeful that the Labour Party really understands how that needs to be used. Do you think that underspend will go back into the farming budget? It has to go back into the farming budget. There is a real risk that it doesn't, but I think that if treasury are thinking, oh, it's just whether it's 100 million or 200 million, it's a smaller amount compared to 2.4 billion, what they don't realise is it will just completely upset the apple cart. And we saw with, for example, Liz Truss' Australia trade deal, it took Defra a year to recover building trust back into stakeholders, into the environmental communities and the farmers. So that is, for me, the critical thing in the budget that they do not take that money. On food policy as a broader issue. I mean, that's what you're known for, the food strategy. Do you think the new government kind of gets what needs to happen? And do you think they'll be able to cut through the many levels of complexity that they face to actually achieve anything? Well, I hope so. Daniel Zeithner has been following this portfolio now. He was a really diligent shadow minister, and he really understands the farming policy. And I think, you know, where's Streeting as well understand the systemic issues. I think on the health side, the real question is, the government have got a big job on their hands transforming the NHS. Can they also deliver the prevention, which is a whole nother series of battles? So that's really where Streeting's challenge. Is he just trying to fix the hospitals or is he trying to stop fewer sick people thrown into the hospital system? Those are two different things, and does he have the capacity to do it? I know that he understands the problem, but it's capacity issue. That's Henry Dimville, babe. And that's it from us for this morning. I'm Kaz Graham. The producer is Beatrice Fenton, and 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. 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