Smart suits and hairy tweeds mixed together in the corridors of power yesterday afternoon as the RSPB held a party at the House of Lords to mark the tenth anniversary of its Volunteer and Farmer Alliance. The hairy tweeds, by the way, were mainly worn by the volunteers who counted the birds - not the farmers on whose land they had done so. We had put on our best business suits for the occasion and it was difficult to tell some of us from the peers and MP's who turned up.
I am not a wholeherated fan of all that RSPB says and does as previous comments in FW and elsewhere may have made clear. But I did participate in the bird count a few years ago and was pleased the volunteers who did it identified 53 species on our land. They missed at least two that I saw a few days after they had completed their survey - Golden Plover and Grey Partridge of which we have a few pairs. So in reality we had 55 species of birds on our LEAF managed farm. The RSPB told me later they regarded 40 species as satisfactory on my type of holding.
My reason for getting involved was partly to satisfy myself that our habitats were OK and that our farming system was not harming wildlife. But if I'm honest I was also keen to have the RSPB's own confirmation that what we do here, which is unremarkable and comparable with many other farms, favours birds as well as production. I reasoned it would be much more difficult for the organisation to criticise what we do if their own evidence showed the opposite.
Indeed, what I and 4,250 or so other farmers have done over the ten year period during which the V&F Alliance has been running is an example of the kind of voluntary approach Defra requires as an alternative to set-aside and to persuade it not to bring in yet another regulation.
Hilary Benn admitted, at the reception, that he had not yet made up his mind on that but he did concede that over the last 25 years farmers had restored or replaced some 80,000 miles of hedges. He went on to say that whether the set-aside replacement were to be voluntary or compulsory it is vital that wildlife protection and production agriculture work together in harmony. That's what I and others have been saying for years and what LEAF has preached since its inception. Perhaps Hilary Benn is beginning to understand our industry at last. Time will tell.