James Rebanks rant/critique:

*****

https://nitter.net/herdyshepherd1/status/2069837080067231789#m


James Rebanks @herdyshepherd1
Jun 24
Has anyone ever published a more useless document than this?

It basically says we want nature and food, but won’t pay more for either, and expect nature to magically appear from farmers chasing profit more ruthlessly

Total bollocks
It is the emptiest document I’ve ever read

[quote tweet] Natural England @NaturalEngland
Jun 24
Profitable farming and a healthy natural environment go hand in hand.
Today's publication of @DefraGovUK 's Farming Roadmap sets a clear direction to deliver both - through better soils, water, nature and more resilient farm businesses.

James Rebanks @herdyshepherd1

I’ve been explaining this for years

The free market commodity model of farming pushes mostly to monocultures and scalable models that effectively simplify ecosystems

We know that from basically everywhere it has been tried

It doesn’t magically make there be more nature…

So it’s like a giant machine that affects all of our landscapes

You only make there be more nature if you can find enough £ from the market or from government to make that happen when it otherwise wouldn’t

It’s like a giant weigh scales…

And right now the weigh scales are say 80% weighed towards production

The once promised £2.4billion for greening turned it a little to nature… but was nowhere near enough

Now that is almost gone…

And these clowns are pretending that nature is going to do great even without the old investment - when we know that the £2.4b wasn’t enough

The scales are going to be 99% tipped to production - everywhere… and that means less nature everywhere not more…

Of course we need a lot of food

I run a productive farm

But we have massive nature decline in the U.K. - and legal obligations to address that

And seemingly government that thinks it’s all going to be fine

It is staggering in its agricultural and ecological illiteracy

Unless you are prepared to pay enough one way or another to tip the scales to create more nature

Then there is no God damn way you’re getting that outcome

DEFRA and Natural England seem never to ask the right questions

How much would we have to spend to get nature restoration at scale?

What would we spend it on?

If you can’t answer these two questions you can’t create scaled up nature recovery and are bumbling amateurs wasting £

[...]

It isn’t even the most significant moment for agriculture since last week

It’s a vacuous pile of waffle

Completely empty of the commitment or the investment to get food security and climate change resilience OR deliver actual scaled up nature recovery

Road Map my arse…

Find me a farmer anywhere that thinks it changes anything fundamental

[...]

James Rebanks
@herdyshepherd1

It has a very simple logic

The state has withdrawn from farming

They’d like us to do all sorts of things but they won’t be investing enough to do any of them so it’s just waffle

Farm how you like, it’s soon going to be none of their business…

[quote tweet] cat frampton @cat_frampton

I’ve been reading the farming roadmap from the government.

Other than a lot of it sounding like a LinkedIn teen just discovering farms are real, (the wide eyed wonder in the ‘vision’ part…!) it’s depressing as hell.

It’s all AI, tech, private finance, regulation and data
Yay…
A bit of pasture with flowers in it.


James Rebanks @herdyshepherd1

There will be no nature restoration

There will be no climate change mitigation

There are no public goods because no one wants to pay for them

These are massive problems but they aren’t farmers responsibility alone

And the state just washed its hands of them - remarkable

We’ve had decades of being lectured by everyone about how we should farm and manage land

And yet the government has basically ripped up any idea of a social contract between society and farmers - taking us back to a pre WW1 situation…

Public debate on farming is now going to be really quick…

‘We want more (INSERT YOUR OWN OUTCOME) on your land’

‘So what… my land is nothing to do with you… you don’t pay anything to me’

Progressive environmental change to create a Net Gain - that’s completely gone

I don’t think farmers should engage with goverment at all

We have one responsibility, to survive and make our businesses profitable…

We didn’t rip this social contract up - quite the opposite, we queued up to access environmental funding and they turned most of us away

And frankly what’s the point of DEFRA and Natural England if they now don’t even do the basics

How anyone leading those organisations can keep their jobs is beyond me - they’ve presided over the decline of an entire system

And the environmental lobby are basically now going to feed on the scraps to manage a few pretend wild sites in otherwise dire landscapes because we are going to have a US style farming and food system

See the Farming road Map for what it is

All this is environmentally disastrous

A disaster for food price inflation

A disaster for food security

And not good for the national interest

So at some point a government will wake up to why they need to do more, but God knows when