Biodiversity

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

The Committee will be enormously grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for giving us this opportunity to discuss biodiversity and agriculture. I declare my interest first and foremost as a farmer and, until recently, chair of the advisory board at the Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

I wish to concentrate my remarks on the need for a sound evidence base on which agricultural technologies and production systems can be developed to deliver optimal environmental benefits, including, of course, biodiversity benefits. However, I think we all first need to recognise that both intensive high-input and extensive low-input agricultural systems present challenges for biodiversity and ecosystem services. That is not to say that these challenges cannot be met but, of course, agriculture is about the production of food. We need to reconcile this with the enhancement of ecosystem services. Good research and long-term monitoring— that is particularly critical—have demonstrated the potential to reconcile productive agriculture with the provision of habitats and food for farmland birds, butterflies and pollinator insects, as referred to in the Question. Indeed, examples of best practice have been demonstrated. That is not to say that the impact of agriculture has not been extreme, as the noble Baroness pointed out. However, alongside that, there have been examples of good practice which we need to follow up.

My greatest concern is about not just the types of biodiversity mentioned in the Question—birds, butterflies and pollinator insects—but the need to look at the fundamentals, such as soil science. After all, this is the basis from which all biodiversity and habitats are derived. The ecosystem services on which we all rely, and on which the environment relies, depend on keeping the soil sciences in good heart. The trouble is, of course, that while any number of people join organisations to conserve birds, butterflies and lichen—like everyone else, I belong to several—somehow or other, to get people to take an interest in worms or soil biodiversity is rather more complicated.

It is a great pity that the debate is so often polarised between intensification and extensification. In both cases you require a multi-purpose approach. There is no technological panacea to meet the challenges of sustainable production. It requires a diversity of approaches specific to the crop in question, the locality and, of course, the ecosystem services which it is desired to enhance. If you are looking for flood control, there will be one set of requirements. If you are looking for biodiversity, there will be others, although of course there will be common factors. I give an example from my own farming practice. I am a fruit producer with intensive orchards containing 3,000 trees per hectare. That is intensive by anyone’s standards. Incidentally, we also have high-level schemes on different land, which are well funded and deliver their own environmental benefits. We do not get subsidies or grants for the intensive systems but they provide a surprisingly wide range of biodiversity benefits. Apple trees and the multi-species windbreaks they require provide habitats and food for invertebrates in spring and summer. The blossom provides pollen and nectar. The herbicide strips provide mining bee habitat—one of these insect pollinators which we simply have to learn to manage better. In winter, windfalls bring in whole flocks of birds which you do not necessarily see in other habitats. This system of production has its benefits, and delivers things such as carbon sequestration at levels that are about equivalent to woodland, and which are of course much higher than arable and grassland. Therefore the outcomes from intensive farming can be the same as, if not more than, the outcomes from some of the agri-environmental systems.

Delivering both food and biodiversity on the same land is known as land sharing, which of course we hear a lot about from organic farmers and the like. I would describe the sort of system of intensive agriculture that I am talking about as precisely that. Also, incidentally, you can call it “land sparing”, in the sense that if you are going to produce a certain quantity of food from a certain area, quite frankly, the more you can allow spare land for alternative uses, such as stewardship schemes and environmental enhancement, the better.

The Cinderella sciences on which we rely—agronomy, soil science and general botany—have been in decline for a long time. We get a lot of research workers who are specialists in very specific areas of technology, and we need to encourage these wider old-fashioned sciences on which we depend. Of course we have to reduce leakages to soil, air and water; I am absolutely certain that minimal cultivations make an enormous contribution, and ploughing in green crops can be a total disaster.

The greatest success with agri-environmental schemes is when you work on the landscape scale, when farmers in a parish and a region work together. SSSIs are usually too small and isolated and, quite frankly, are badly managed. Bring them together; let farmers co-operate on a regional scale, and you will start to achieve critical mass.