Last year I was a farmer, this year I'm a park-keeper
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I have also become a member of the Arable Stewardship Scheme, which pays me for leaving two-metre
beetle-banks dividing some fields. As the name implies, these are areas where beetles frolic and
gambol. Then there are the six-metre strips round other fields that we leave untouched and, of course,
unsprayed. Here animals rather larger than beetles can find space to live. And finally there is one complete
field of 44 acres that we leave fallow in an effort to encourage the re-appearance of the traditional stone
curlew, which was once common on the south Cambridgeshire chalks. My environmentalist friends just laugh. They tell me that I am merely tinkering with the problem. What I should be doing, they say, with their eyes shining with righteousness, is forswear vile fungicides and give up horrid herbicides. That way lies paradise at least for the bugs and bees and birds, which would once again live happily ever after. The snag is that if we turned England into an organic island, not only would the cost of food rise by around 40 per cent, but we would have to import a substantial quantity of our cereals, oilseeds and proteins. I would also need more staff than the three men I employ today. Quite where they would live is unclear, since even the smallest house in my village costs £300,000. But minor details like this do not normally bother the proselytising green brotherhood. It is true that, were I to go organic, we would have a richer and more varied environment. Of course if you live in Islington, earn £85,000 a year and own a weekend cottage in north Norfolk this may appear an attractive proposition. But to most people it sounds like a bad bargain.
Now, as the pendulum swings away from food production and towards environmental protection, new CAP reforms stress "cross-compliance", which means that before I can get the best subsidies, I must first prove that I am looking after the environment. I have no problems with this. There is nothing shameful about being a park-keeper. Indeed it seems eminently reasonable for me to prove that I am a nice and responsible farmer before I receive that little brown envelope with the big cheque. From now on British farmland will have to do three things: the cultivated land will remain the source of our food, the remainder will provide a habitat for wildlife and the resulting landscape will provide eye candy for an urban population. I am a farmer; welcome
to my park.
