"‘Insulting’: the Welsh farmers who fear an eco land grab" by Matt Rudd
"A post-Brexit masterplan means farms must sacrifice up to 20 per cent of their holdings to trees and wildlife. They fear extinction, and say it will only increase our reliance on imports"
I am grateful that The Sunday Times published a very good article yesterday regarding the Welsh Government’s egregious Sustainable Farming Scheme and the dire effects it would have upon farmers in Wales whom the government plan to dictate that 10% of their farmland must be used for planting trees and another 10% for what is essentially “rewilding.”
This in my opinion and others is the UN’s Agenda 21 | Agemda 2030 on steroids. The late Rosa Koire and others have warned about this potential for well over a decade. Rosa’s seminal book, Behind the Green Mask was published September 2, 2011.
The following is a reposting of The Sunday Times article.
‘Insulting’: the Welsh farmers who fear an eco land grab
A post-Brexit masterplan means farms must sacrifice up to 20 per cent of their holdings to trees and wildlife. They fear extinction, and say it will only increase our reliance on imports
By Matt Rudd • Sunday March 17 2024, 12.00am • The Sunday Times
Andrew and Stella Phillips of Tylebrythos Farm near Brecon with their children Lexi and Cam. The farm has been in the family for five generations but now faces an uncertain future because of the Sustainable Farming Scheme
Photo: Adrian Sherratt for The Sunday Times
Once you’ve worn out second gear through all the new 20mph villages on the A40, the road starts to climb. After Brecon, you’re greeted by a windscreen full of bunched-up topography and, in my case, a cup of tea in a farm kitchen with Stella and Andrew Phillips.
They’ve been up since 2am as they often are at this time of year. It’s lambing and calving season and in the maternity unit — a large shed next to the farmhouse — the 12-hour-old calf is feeding well. Two pens along, the Phillips children, Lexi, 11, and Cam, 7, are looking after four mewling lambs whose mothers decided motherhood wasn’t for them. The rest of the shed is a cacophonous nursery of newborns.
Once the lambs are strong enough, the hefted flock will leave the farm and walk the long walk further up into the Beacons. There, they will spend summer grazing a patch of common land they instinctively know is theirs. It has been this way in these parts for hundreds of years and in this particular family for five generations. Whether it will be for a sixth is the question.
“What we do, we do well and we’re proud of that, but what the government is proposing is daunting,” says Stella, 42. “The complexity of it is insane.”
This is the Welsh government’s masterplan for agriculture in Wales after Brexit. No longer will farmers receive subsidies just for farming. In the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) which begins rolling out next year, farmers will “be rewarded for responding to the climate and nature emergencies”. Most controversially, 10 per cent of farmland must be given to trees and 10 per cent must be earmarked as wildlife habitat. How much money farmers will receive for losing up to a fifth of their productive land remains unclear.
In addition, the scheme sets out 17 “universal actions” controlling everything from habitat maintenance to “continuous personal development”. Andrew, 47, bridles at the thought of online training modules. “I’ve been foot-trimming for 30 years,” he says. “I don’t need to have a video presentation on it.” Once I’ve established that foot-trimming is chiropody for sheep, Stella describes the level of interventionism in the scheme as “insulting”.
“We already have a lot of rules and regulations which we cope with and farm with already,” she says. “But I don’t know how we’ll manage with all of this. When are you going to have time to farm? If things don’t work out there in the fields, you can forget the desktop in here because there will be nothing to measure, nothing to monitor, nothing to sell. If we have to plant 10 per cent trees, we’ll be finished.”
Welsh farmers protest outside the Senedd, in Cardiff, last month over planned changes to post-Brexit subsidies which will require more land to be given over by them for tree planting and habitat creation | Photo: JON ROWLEY/EPA
The Phillips own 85 acres of small, patchworked fields and rent a chunk more. They’ve been around with a tape measure trying to work out how they’ll find eight-and-a-half football pitches’ worth of woodland. “We’ve let some of the hedgerows shoot up but we don’t know if that will count,” says Andrew. They’re also worried about the requirement to create ponds and scrapes (when topsoil is scraped back to create temporary ponds and bogs). “If the ponds are fenced off, they require planning permission,” says Stella. “If they aren’t, we’ve got young kids and I’d wonder about health and safety.” Water attracts midges and midges bring disease, she continues, before listing a whole range of sheep-killing afflictions. “I don’t want to see liver fluke or blue tongue and I don’t want to see Schmallenberg [virus] again, that was horrible.”
Earlier this month protesting farmers left 5,500 pairs of wellies outside the Senedd to represent the number of job losses — 11 per cent of the total agricultural workforce — that the government itself expects as a result of its new scheme. The outgoing first minister, Mark Drakeford, has vigorously defended the plan. “The bargain cannot be that the public puts its hand into the pocket to put millions of pounds, maybe £300 million every year on the table, for farmers to just do whatever farmers think they would like to do with it,” he said at a recent press conference. “We want to see farmers in Wales producing food in ways that are consistent with a climate crisis.”
[I am inserting here the Farmers Weekly video of the 5,500 pairs of wellies on the steps of the Welsh Senedd in Cardiff Bay fondly known as Corruption Bay:
The Sunday Times article continues . . .
The Climate Change Act commits the Westminster government to cutting the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, and environmental groups say the Welsh scheme is vital to address climate change and nature loss. “We’ve seen a 98 per cent decrease in wildflower meadows [since the Second World War],” says Rachel Sharp of Wildlife Trusts Wales. “We are in a nature crisis.” At the McCartneys livestock auction in Brecon on Tuesday morning, angry farmers have a different view.
Steve Jones, 43, has just sold the lambs he’s brought down from his mid-Wales farm for £3.91 a kilo, about £180 per lamb (“per head”) — “almost a record”. Prices are up for three reasons: last year’s drought; the Ramadan festival; and the Houthi shipping crisis in the Red Sea. If prices are so good, why does the local paper’s front page read “Welsh Farming RIP”?
“We’re no better off because our costs are so high,” says Jones. “Before Covid, we were paying £120 a tonne for fertiliser, then it went up to £700. All the subsidies do is produce cheap food for the supermarkets. If they were paying us £200 a head, we wouldn’t need help but it’s all about low prices. Then you hear Tesco is making four or five billion profit a year and meanwhile, farmers are dying out.”
Tractors parked on the Cardiff Bay link road as part of the protest last month Photo: ANDREW MATTHEWS/PA WIRE
Jones gestures to his compatriots gathered around the auctioneer, average age at least 60, average back distinctly stooped. “Now the government want to go to these environmental payments to grow trees and habitats for birds and all this shit,” he says. “We’re there to produce food to keep people alive but we’re ruled by absolute idiots.”
In 1984 the UK produced 78 per cent of domestic food by value. By 2022 that had dropped to 60 per cent. The new scheme will only increase our reliance on imports. The government itself predicts it will reduce livestock numbers in Wales by up to 122,000 units — 122,000 cattle or 800,000 sheep. It’s not surprising that food security comes up a lot at the market. What will happen if Wales — the food basket of the UK — stops filling the supermarket shelves, ask the farmers. We’ll just import more meat from Australia and New Zealand, I suggest. What about quality and safety, they say. Consumers only care about price, I suggest. And what happens if you can’t import?
Tom Pritchard practices his machinegun sales patter in the bathroom mirror. The 24-year-old auctioneer is even more attuned to the vagaries of geopolitics than the farmers. “One of the ships got turned around recently because of the conflict in the Red Sea,” he says. “That really helped us.” Conversely, when an Australian container ship bound for China was diverted to the UK after a diplomatic row, cheap meat shipped 10,000 miles across the world meant prices dropped by 50p a kilo across Wales.
“How does any of this make sense?” asks Rob Powell, 57, who farms on a precipitous hill 15 miles north of Brecon. “Our lambs are farmed in these hills like they have been for centuries in an entirely sustainable way. There’s one short road trip to market. Why would you replace that with lower-standard produce refrigerated and shipped right across the planet? How is that sustainable?”
The longer you spend in this farming heartland, the more you happen upon infuriating anomalies. A younger female farmer tells me she has about 10 per cent woodland on her farm near Carmarthen but an energy firm is putting pylons right through it. The woodland will be lost and they’ll still have to plant from scratch. And no, the energy firm won’t relocate its pylons.
Tom Pritchard practices his machinegun sales patter in the bathroom mirror. The 24-year-old auctioneer is even more attuned to the vagaries of geopolitics than the farmers. “One of the ships got turned around recently because of the conflict in the Red Sea,” he says. “That really helped us.” Conversely, when an Australian container ship bound for China was diverted to the UK after a diplomatic row, cheap meat shipped 10,000 miles across the world meant prices dropped by 50p a kilo across Wales.
“How does any of this make sense?” asks Rob Powell, 57, who farms on a precipitous hill 15 miles north of Brecon. “Our lambs are farmed in these hills like they have been for centuries in an entirely sustainable way. There’s one short road trip to market. Why would you replace that with lower-standard produce refrigerated and shipped right across the planet? How is that sustainable?”
The longer you spend in this farming heartland, the more you happen upon infuriating anomalies. A younger female farmer tells me she has about 10 per cent woodland on her farm near Carmarthen but an energy firm is putting pylons right through it. The woodland will be lost and they’ll still have to plant from scratch. And no, the energy firm won’t relocate its pylons.
Mark Drakeford, the outgoing Welsh first minister, bears the brunt of farmers’ anger | Photo: ANDREW MATTHEWS/PA WIRE
Further north, a large industrial manufacturer has bought 700 acres of farmland to turn into a forest or, as it says on its website, “an exciting new woodland project to help tackle the great challenge of climate change”. The company makes submarine panels, one farmer tells me. “It’s still making submarine panels but it’s buying up farmland to offset its carbon. How is that helping?”
The key gripe, though, concerns what farmers perceive as the government’s intractable blanket approach. Its rural affairs minister has insisted that nothing is yet set in stone and that they’re still listening but farmers tell me the consultations have been continuing for seven years, and government hasn’t budged.
“Instead of saying you must do this, they could say can you do this,” says Abi Reader, deputy president of NFU Cymru. “Why not give farmers a suite of options? They want sequestration [carbon capture] and biodiversity. That does not have to come from a tree. They’ve taken the headlines from the climate change committee report which says use trees but if they’d read a bit further down, it says trees and several other options.”
In these parts, Drakeford is a long-in-the-tooth dictator, captured by environmentalists, intransigent to the needs of farmers and, by turn, us consumers. For his part, as he is replaced by Vaughan Gething, he leaves guns blazing. “We are in this position because farmers in Wales voted to leave the European Union,” he told parliament last month. Data suggests farmers voted broadly in line with other demographics but one farmer who admits he supported Brexit tells me he now deeply regrets it. “I voted for something better and instead, we’ve got this,” he says with a shrug.
“It’s got so toxic now I think we have to stop and start again,” says Reader, who runs a dairy farm in the Vale of Glamorgan. “You can only hope a new first minister is a chance to reset. We all need to lock ourselves in a room and hammer out a solution. It can be done but it’s just quite hard to open the door at the moment.”
Back on the Phillips Farm, Stella has her head in her hands as Andrew briefly floats the idea of quitting and moving to Spain, A Place in the Sun-style. The last time they went on holiday, they managed two days in a wet tent in Pembrokeshire before a crisis on the farm brought them rushing back. I ask Lexi what she wants to be when she’s older. “A farmer and a sheep dog trialler,” she says without hesitation. Cam, a realist, wants to be a farm contractor. The subtitle of the Sustainable Farming Scheme document reads: “Keeping farmers farming”. For how long remains to be seen.
The following statement from Rosa Koire’s website, The Post Sustainability Institute encapsulates how Rosa came to define Agenda 21 as a result of her experiences as a forensic commercial real estate appraiser specialising in eminent domain valuation and fighting a huge redevelopment plan in Santa Rosa, California.
The Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme certainly sounds like, looks like and smells like the UN’s Agenda 21/Agenda 2030.
I do not think that it is by accident that the Welsh Government’s Farming Scheme includes "17 Universal Actions" when the UN’s Agenda 2030 has it’s “17 Sustainable Development Goals.” This is particularly so when Lesley Griffiths, the Welsh Minister overseeing the “scheme” was jetting around the world to attend climate change conferences from at least 2018 when I began to notice the hippocracy of her “low carbon” travel.
There is a very good reason why only 3% of farmers trust the Welsh Government according to a recent poll. They are most certainly not alone in this.
Everyone I know supports the farmers’ fight to survive 100% and will continue to do so.
We are living in utter, utter madness. There are no words for any of this.