Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The young woman determined to get herself a career in farming.

What the DEFRA Secretary of State had to say to the Labour Party conference about farming, not a huge amount, and how the spiralling cost of the red diesel used by agricultural machinery threatens to put some farmers in the red.

Every pass of a tractor or a piece of equipment across a field adds more to their diesel costs.

So the ever-increasing roller coaster, which tends to be upwards at the minute, is a big worry for them.

And on Farming Today, we're hearing from each of the main parties on farming, food and the environment.

The Labour Party conference in Liverpool, which finished yesterday, has dominated the headlines with big announcements on the National Care Service and reforming the pensions triple lock.

The Prime Minister didn't mention agriculture or rural communities in his speech, and there didn't appear to be a great deal of substance on farming in the DEFRA Secretary of State, Angela Eagle's, speech to the conference.

She did talk, though, about food security and the impact climate change is having on farmers.

even swamping the countryside now.

Thanks, Danny Finkelstein's sister, who oversaw DEFRA and their diversification initiative to bring busloads of people from the Indian subcontinent and Africa into the green and pleasant land that they cannot maintain, they can only destroy.

Thanks so much for that.

Speaking of busloads, illegal migrants got a police motorcade escort when they docked at Gosport because Patriot Platform tried to delay their arrival into Dover.

So we've kind of talked about government a little bit.

I'm interested in, um, the relationship with your members and DEFRA at the moment.

Okay.

In terms of how that feels, and how you hope it might change in the coming years.

And I think we've said that from, you know, from day one, that, uh, if you want productivity to increase in this country, our members can help with that.

And, and the other thing I'd add to that is that, uh, it feels like we've, we have, um, more particularly Gavin, um, has, has got a, a good relationship going, and the whole team have got a, a good relationship going with the civil service.

With DEFRA, the real challenge comes with Treasury and MHCLG-

Yeah

They've also felt neglected, and a lot of them are in big trouble.

I don't know if everyone will have seen this, but last week Defra had their sort of portal open for, um, SFI funding, which is Sustainable Farming Incentive, and that is money that farmers can apply for to, I mean, generally keep them afloat.

This is after we left the EU, um, and the subsidies that they got.

It was a complete disaster.

So I think, I don't think you can really argue that fisheries biologists don't understand what it's like to be on a fishing boat.

But I think the managers, the people who sit in at DEFRA and The EU, for example, many of them probably have never been in a fishing boat and don't understand the way they work and how hard it is and how you can't sort of devise policies which require enormous amounts of extra work aside from dealing with what they're doing.

So, I mean, when a crab fishing fisherman is out there on his boat They steam between one string and the next, and then they're lifting these pots, they're rebaiting them, taking the crabs out.

They're working full time.

Well, I think with small-scale fisheries, yes.

I think that you already have a sort of two-tier system around England and Wales with these inshore fishing conservation and management organisations.

they're sort of managing things locally but then superimposed on that is whatever it comes down from DEFRA and I think it would be better really if it was just left to the IFCA's to do the managing of the fisheries in their area why impose other considerations on them other than maybe setting certain goals like you must have so much area reserved as an MPA or whatever rather than saying to them we're going to decide what the MPAs are I mean the big problem with that probably is that the IFGAs don't have the funds to fund some of the research that's necessary to implement certain policies

It's a great concept the IFGAs

So that's some really nice framing about nature, about the importance of...

Yesterday, the Secretary of State for DEFRA was saying that nature is essential, that it's not a luxury, and that's perfect to hear.

But now we need to hear the policies to build on that.

Now, the government's only three months in, so we're not expecting much, but it would be wonderful by the end of conference to hear an actual announcement that's new, that's going to bring nature on, so something that will help nature recovery on the ground.

I was chasing the farming minister, Stephen Morgan, down the street.

He was running much quicker than I was.

Farmers have been really upset about DEFRA's FFI payments, which sort of ran out instantly, six hours, I think it was, application process.

We're trying to encourage farmers to be nature-friendly.

Well, I think it's worth mentioning SFI first in the news because we have been talking about it loosely in our piece about soil.

There were farmers that missed out on the application for SFI 26 and DEFRA have said...

They know that those that missed out will be disappointed not to have secured an agreement this year.

They've also said though in their farming blog that in keeping with commitments made in the farming roadmap for 2050, they do plan to offer an SFI scheme in 2027 and they'll look to open that offer as early as possible to ensure that farmers can access the funding.

It's just the conventional way across Australia that people work.

So yeah, some similarities.

In some ways, I thought some of those countries probably was further ahead in the sense that the climate pushes that are now we're experiencing in the uk in the last couple of years that are pushing people into this thinking have been around in australia for 20 or 30 years probably the same in argentina and so they're probably 20 or 30 years ahead of us in sort of that change and the farmer groups that help facilitate that are much more established because of that so in some ways they're ahead and there's lots to learn from them but actually lots of lots of things actually the other way around particularly across europe where they're still become an agricultural policy all the farmers were incredibly interested and practically pretty jealous in this SFI scheme and they thought it sounded much more farmer friendly and you know for all that DEFRA gets a lot of stick a lot of it probably rightly I think you know looking internationally farmers here probably it's a pretty farmer friendly scheme I would say and it's been designed with a lot of farmers in mind so DEFRA probably deserves some credit they don't always get compared to how some of these schemes work in Europe where know okay there is this kind of basic payment which a lot of farmers like but a lot of the environmental schemes there are crazy the way they're set up and incredibly complicated and probably not delivering change in the same way that sfi would be in england

so your research is showing that sfi compared to other parts of the world actually is more farmer friendly than many other schemes