LEAF Speak Out: Difficult Questions - Environment

Do you approve of wind farms?

Renew­able ener­gy is noth­ing new on farms. For hun­dreds of years farm­ers have pro­duced ener­gy – oats to feed hors­es as well as wood to heat hous­es. Wind pow­er has also been used for years, to pow­er pumps for exam­ple. Renew­ables are part of the Government’s goals to reduce the country’s car­bon footprint.

Why are you paid to plant hedges and trees?

Farm­ers’ sin­gle farm pay­ment (sup­port) is linked to them under­tak­ing their choice of many dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties e.g. plant­i­ng trees, open­ing up foot­paths, plant­i­ng wild­flower mead­ows for birds and bees all which sup­port our nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment now and for the future.

Farm­ers are respon­si­ble for a big decline in bird num­bers, par­tic­u­lar­ly species on the red and amber list, how would you respond to this criticism?

Many species of birds have increased, whilst some have decreased. There are many rea­sons for the change in bird pop­u­la­tions, such as a wet spring can reduce suc­cess­ful hatch­ings of young birds, cold win­ters can severe­ly impact the sur­vival rates of small birds like wrens and gold­crests. Farm­ers are active­ly engaged with cre­at­ing habi­tat for birds, feed­ing birds over win­ter and cre­at­ing spaces for birds, such as sky­larks, to nest.

Farm­ers pol­lute rivers and streams with muck/​pesticides, what are you doing to make sure this doesn’t hap­pen from your farm?

We imple­ment lots of good prac­tices on the farm to min­i­mize our impact on the envi­ron­ment and water cours­es. These include not apply­ing autumn weed con­trol prod­ucts to the crop when there is any risk of the prod­uct get­ting into rivers, such as when fields are wet. We only spread muck when fields are dry, we wash out our sprayers in spe­cial areas where the was water is col­lect­ed in tanks and dis­posed of safely.