THE Boris Johnson government recently announced a package of “environmental land management schemes” for England. These pretend to support sustainable farming and revival of the rural environment. They don’t.

The overall aim is to bring 60 per cent of England’s agricultural land under sustainable management by 2030. This means that, even if the targets are achieved, 40 per cent of land will still be farmed unsustainably.

The three elements of the package are:

• The “sustainable farming incentive”: essentially a soil management scheme
• The “local nature recovery scheme”: a farm-level initiative to take land out of production
• The “landscape recovery scheme”: a large-scale scheme to change land use

The first (announced last year) gives small incentives directly to farmers to improve soil quality and animal health, but the two new “recovery” schemes bribe landowners to find additional private-sector funding to take land out of food production.

Farmers and landowners are by no means the same thing. Much of England’s agricultural land is farmed on a tenanted basis, but the new schemes ultimately offer money to landowners to stop farming.

Cheshire has some of the highest quality agricultural land in England, making it the most productive milkfield in the country. So most Cheshire farms, particularly in the east of the county, are dairy farms. Forty per cent of all farms in the county are tenanted, and the proportion is higher in the dairy lands of East Cheshire.

This also happens to be where the richest Englishman, and the nation’s biggest private landowner, has his main private country estate. The Duke of Westminster not only owns the most prestigious parts of Westminster (Mayfair and Belgravia), he also has an estate of 10,800 acres in Cheshire, and landholdings in Scotland and elsewhere.

The average farm size in East Cheshire is 146 acres. This is small compared with other parts of England but dairy farms are always much smaller than arable and mixed farms, and it also reflects the quality of the land. So more cows can be grazed per acre than elsewhere, while still producing high quality milk.

The average herd size in Cheshire is 205 cows, which means the most productive grasslands can support slightly more than one cow per acre. There are very few farming areas in the world that can match this.

Some of the Duke of Westminster’s estate is parkland and forest, but the vast majority is farmed by his tenants. This amounts to almost 50 rented farms.

The government schemes are structured so that if the duke wished to take advantage, he could close down some of these farms, put their farmers and workers out of work, and get paid by the government.

But the schemes are even more pernicious than that. The application process is incredibly complicated, and it involves finding a private-sector partner who will pay the majority of the money.

Private companies will not do this out of charity. Lord Bath keeps his Longleat estate relatively intact by renting land to the bourgeois holiday camp, Centre Parcs. The same is likely to be true for other landowners, and productive land will simply be turned into holiday destinations.

Small independent farmers will not have the resources to find commercial partners, and so it is only large landowners that will be able to take advantage of the schemes. 

Tenant farmers are told that their ability to bid for the scheme depends on the terms of their lease, but every farm tenancy lease is based on an agreement to farm the land. So any proposal to take land out of production needs the agreement of the landowner. And the landowner will not do this unless it benefits them, which may be winding up the lease and taking the land out of production themselves.

The scheme also says that “Common land will need a single entity for entering agreements” which is logically a threat to the legal concept of common land.

The schemes look for bespoke agreements with no strict criteria other than that they “crowd-in private finance and ensure coherence with private schemes and markets.”

In addition they must “deliver good value for money by delivering significant outcomes.” In other words, the grant that landowners can bid for is just seed-corn money to attract private finance, and then show that this will be at least as profitable as, say, producing milk.

And there are no proscriptions about the future of the land to be taken out of food production. There are no definitions or goals for the environmental gains.

The whole package is based on a false dichotomy between agriculture and biodiversity. It is only high-intensity industrial farming (with high chemical inputs) that has destroyed ecosystems.

If the government had wanted to follow up last year’s Sustainable Farming Incentive, it would have looked at farming practices and the need for diversified food production.

As a whole the ELMS package pays lip service to middle-class environmentalists, while actually giving bribes to landowners to take land out of food production in return for private-sector investment in alternatives for which the government will then grant change of land use.

If the aristocracy and other large landowners run down domestic food production, they open the door to poor quality food imports from any old trading partner the government can find.

In this week’s Farmers Weekly both the NFU (the employers) and the Country Land and Business Association (the landowners) speak out against the schemes on the basis that they undermine domestic food production, and they do not create sustainability.

At its 56th Congress in November 2021, the Communist Party of Britain resolved to further develop its policy on food and agriculture. The principles of sustainability and food production meeting the needs of the working class were already in place, and the agricultural proposals put forward in the CPB East of England district’s new pamphlet Eastern Rising are a further step forward.

Dragging finance capital into agriculture to take land out of food production does nothing for the environment, and only benefits the rich.

Hugh Kirkbride is a member of the Communist Party executive committee, a former Unite regional officer, and before that a worker in both food and agriculture.