Exclusive: Truss to enlist farmers to combat floods

Farmers will be encouraged to work more closely together to help fight flooding, Defra secretary Liz Truss has suggested.

Speaking to Farmers Weekly on a farm visit in Hampshire on Friday (22 January), Ms Truss said she was keen for farmers to join forces to tackle a range of environmental issues.

“We are working on a 25-year environment plan, which is going to mean much more integration across what Natural England, the Environment Agency and organisations like the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) do,” she said.

See also: Farmers to get green light to maintain watercourses

“That will make it easier for farmer groups to get together, like we have seen today, and do things for example that help alleviate floods potentially, but also encourage wildlife and nature too.

“What I want to do is make this approach ‘business as usual’.”

Defra’s 25-year environment plan will help conserve the environment by encouraging farmers to work more closely together.

During her visit, Ms Truss heard how farmers in Selborne had worked with volunteers and formed “cluster groups” to help reintroduce the iconic harvest mouse.

By working collectively, farmers in Selborne have created a connected habitat for birds and small insects and discovered more than 150 nests of harvest mice around the village.

Ms Truss said this “farmer cluster” method had a role to play in alleviating flooding on farms.

For example, to manage flood resilience, it was far better to “look at land as a whole within a water catchment area, as opposed to individual units”.

Her comments follow a Farmers Weekly survey, which found the majority of producers would be willing to let their land be flooded to alleviate problems elsewhere in exchange for funding.

Ms Truss has already indicated at the Oxford Farming Conference that farmers will be able to manage their own watercourses to prevent flooding.

But her latest comments appear to suggest that the government is also considering much broader flood mitigation measures, involving a wider range of measures.

Farm leaders and environmentalists agree that flood mitigation measures should be introduced on a catchment-wide basis rather than on a farm-by-farm basis.

But there is much debate over how this should be achieved – whether by dredging or other measures.

Conservationists have made much of a project that enabled the Yorkshire town of Pickering to stay dry this winter – despite rejecting plans for a £20m flood defence wall.

Instead, the town planted 29ha of woodland and constructed 167 “leaky dams” and 187 other permeable obstructions in watercourses further upstream.

See also: Farmers have a key role in fighting floods with water storage

NFU policy director Andrew Clark said high velocity floods in upland England last month had been much more damaging than lowland floods, seen in previous years.

But Mr Clark said there was limited evidence that flood mitigation strategies designed to “slow the flow” were effective on a major catchment scale.

Any measure to reduce flooding should be science-based, he added.

The NFU was looking to meet with the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology to discuss whether and how major land use change might lead to a reduction in flood risk.

“We are working to ensure that where farmers offer flood management services they get rewarded,” said Mr Clark.

“At the moment, flooding happens in a completely unplanned way on agricultural land and for very little reward and we want to change that part of the jigsaw as well.”