Three years after the UK made the decision to leave the European Union there has been much speculation and conversation from politicians and businesses alike as to how it has affected the country and whether Brexit was one big mistake.
Hearing from people within the agricultural industry, it is still a fairly mixed opinion, however it does seem that the issues facing British farmers are more of a “global” and “government” issue, rather than Brexit-related.
According to a farmer in the UK “Covid-19 caused more disruption to UK agriculture than Brexit”.
Olly Harrison, an arable farmer on the outskirts of Liverpool said: “It has complicated imports such as seed and we have different regulations regarding chemicals coming in.
“However, this is not a Brexit problem, it’s a UK government and European problem of not being fully-a-foot getting things in order.
“It is all solvable, but it hasn’t been done in a timely manner.”
Harrison said that he thinks even with the current state of UK agriculture, they are still better off out of the EU as he thinks “we’d have got even more tangled up in the energy crisis”.
His biggest concern for farmers currently is the rising interest rates, “it’s crazy, it seems to be the elephant in the room, no one seems to want to mention interest rates”.
“Two years ago I swapped my combine and the interest on the deal was £24,000 over a six-year term, if I made that same deal today on these interest rates, it would’ve been £78,000.
“Someone is making money somewhere and it’s not farmers.”
Land values
There was a perception coming from farmers and investors that land value was going to drop, along with concerns that the land market itself was going to slow down.
Grace Millbank, a chartered surveyor from Bletsoes said: “In the past 12 months, it is evident that the land market remains buoyant, with strong values achieved for both bare land and complete residential farms.
“The apparent confidence in the farmland market which has continued to grow even since we left Europe, suggests that the perception amongst farmers and investors is that land remains a highly valuable asset, and the pre-Brexit worries that the market place would take a sharp drop, does not seem to have come to fruition as yet.”
Millbank explained that in terms of farming and environmental policy, Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) “have been very eager to demonstrate that now schemes such as Basic Payment Scheme and Countryside Stewardship are outside of EU jurisdiction, there is room for the rules to be changed”.
“One such example is the change to the penalty system, which has arguably become less harsh on “accidental” breaches, since coming under domestic control,” she said.
“Being outside of Europe has also allowed for the removal of the upper limit on funding available on Countryside Stewardship Capital Grants, which has made the scheme more accessible to those wishing to pursue larger projects on their holding.”
Grants after Brexit
When leaving Europe, Britain waved goodbye to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments, leaving them less reliant on production support and more so on profitable farming.
Like many, Dewi Parry is fundamentally against the support, but with poor prices from retailers and rising input costs, farmers have been left with no choice but to be dependent on them.
Parry, who farms sheep in Wales said: “Brexit has negatively affected agriculture to date in Wales, however it’s nuanced. I am no defender of the EU on agriculture, or the CAP, but farmers knew where they stood, there was certainty.
“Welsh farmers do not know what the replacement Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) is going to pay out for, nor, importantly, how much the payments may amount to.”
He added that CAP wasn’t a “good piece” of legislation. Parry said: “It was a blunt instrument to keep food more affordable, but had the inevitable consequence of making some farms massive, by enabling them the capital to easily swallow up next door’s farm.”
Former National Federation of Young Farmers Club (NFYFC) chairman and arable farmer, Ed Dungait explained the biggest effect of Brexit on the arable sector will be the loss of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS).
“It is a huge income problem, but on principle I don’t feel that we should all have been getting area payments.
Dungait said that he is “aware” that some have felt the pinch of Brexit much more than others, especially those in the livestock sectors with added difficulties in imports and exports, along with the concern of new trade deals flooding the market, and meat being imported that has been produced to lower welfare standards than the UK.
He added: “Grain is a world commodity and the price is set by global trade, so I can’t say for me personally it has affected me.
“However, I would say that the leaders of the Brexit campaign have not delivered as I had hoped.”
A global problem
Parry believes that the EU, Welsh and UK Governments are all guilty of the same thing. “They’re apportioning blame locally for a global problem,” he said.
He explained his views on the stigma around farmers and the current ‘climate crisis’ and said that the “world needs to address the problem”.
He said: “I think climate change is real, we are a species who learnt how to harness fire and have spent 4,000 years finding more things to burn; if you set your sofa on fire, your front room is going to heat up, it’s obvious.
“There is no sense though in farming sustainably in Snowdonia if you’re going to import food from a deforested Amazon. Same goes for animal welfare standards.
“They are part of your ethics, and your ethics matter everywhere, or they matter nowhere. The only way to stop environmental damage in the global south is if the affluent west stop buying in environmentally damaging produce.”
