Common Agricultural Policy (EUC Report)

Sorry, it is a technical term. They will not have the time to try to understand how the thought processes go on that regulatory stuff. So the money will probably not end up where people think it is going to end up—in good environmental schemes that will help the land. Then you come on to the debate about the role of farmers. Do we actually want people who enjoy and love the land, who understand and will work with the vagaries of nature and who do not have a nine to five mentality? You cannot have that mentality when you are dealing with the countryside, the weather, livestock and stuff like that. Those people do not like paperwork and they do not like being treated like idiots either. If you think that someone who has done an environmental studies course in university, who has done one farm walk and then starts producing books telling you how to run a farm, knows what they are doing, you have got another think coming. I would love to know how many people who write these regulations actually possess a pair of Wellington boots. I should not think that it is very many of them. Then there is the necessity of supporting certain markets. If you want to have grassland and parkland still and have it properly done—and under the countryside stewardship scheme, some of it must be managed that way, quite correctly—you must have some cattle left. Of course, there is a big problem about how you keep cattle, the types of cattle, and what happens if cattle become totally uneconomic. In some parts of the country, it is very hard to find lawnmowers to come and eat the grass in countryside stewardship schemes. So we may need to distort things there to ensure that the environmental side is looked after properly. The last thing I have to say is on the character of the farmer. The reports from Defra and other places glibly say that the farmer should learn about risk management and should join co-operatives and selling groups, and so on. Well, the co-op made a nasty mess of selling its wheat this year, so it does not always work. The large buying and selling groups can make just as many mistakes as the small farmer, so you cannot rely on that. As for options and futures, they are quite dangerous financial instruments. I have a friend who is a potato farmer who went heavily bust on that a few years back, thinking that he was hedging against losing his potato crop. There would not be so much money to be made out of them in the City if they were not also high risk. At the end of the day, if there is a high reward there is a high risk behind it. The sort of person who is managing land is probably not the sort of person who is interested in that sort of risk or that sort of business or intuitively knows it. If you release half the active sellers—I am trying to think of another word for those with sharp practices—or the financial advising people on to the farms, you will again have some disasters. It is all very well saying to farmers that they should diversify but, again, you come back to character. A lot of them do not want to run bed and breakfasts or hotels. And then you have the problem of planning. If you want to get a composting unit on to your farm, or something like that, which is nice and green and environmental, everyone will object because they will say that it smells—and then it will take one and a half or two years to get planning, if you get it at all. So it is not easy. You have to get capital for this; you probably have not been making money, so where is the capital going to come from? It is a different kind of business person you want. Is that the sort of person you really want running the countryside and land management in future? Perhaps it is—I do not know—but I am not sure that some of the people who are there are the people that you are making the right recommendations to.