Opinion: Getting it right with ELM crucial to farming survival

Football, the late Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said, isn’t a matter of life and death; “it’s more serious than that”.

The future Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme outlined in Defra’s Agricultural Transition Plan won’t be a matter of life and death either. It will be more serious than that.

Time was, if an agri-environment scheme wasn’t too bonkers, run by idiots or paying sod all, you might go into it. Most farm businesses did not live or die by it, as there was also the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) to fall back on – a vital bulwark against low prices and fluctuating markets.

See also: Defra unveils roadmap to ELM scheme

But with Brexit, someone got the idea that we must switch farm support for largely economic or social ends into the environment. So right now, in some lair at Defra, the ELM scheme is slowly taking shape, like an orc in The Lord of the Rings. We can’t see it happen, but we are very anxious about how it will look when it finally emerges.

Now, I am very pleased to be part of a group running a Defra-funded “test and trial” (T&T) for the ELM scheme. It’s allowing us to talk to farmers about how they think the scheme should work, and how the Land Management Plan (LMP) that will be the basis of an ELM application could be created.

The problem is that it’s really difficult to find a method that gathers enough information about the farm, and rewards it for what it has and how it manages it, that is not fantastically complex, or doesn’t leave something vital out. “All singing, all dancing”, or “Keep it simple, stupid”?

Also, can the same LMP work in Kent, Cornwall and Cumbria, or for a dairy, an arable and a fruit farm? Can it work on 10ha and on 1,000ha?

This wouldn’t matter if the ELM scheme was just adding to the bottom line. But with BPS going, the ELM scheme will be the bottom line, for many; life or death. If it lets anyone drop through a big hole marked “ineligible”, it will have failed.

The concerns about the ELM scheme are many, the details few. Will future payments be based on more than income foregone, the cheapest option for the Treasury? Where will the line be drawn between “incentive” and “regulation” in the Sustainable Farming Incentive? Will the Rural Payments Agency ever get any better?

As farmers, we often want it both ways. We say we want flexibility so we can adapt a scheme as we go along, yet we like a scheme where we just follow the recipe, because that’s easier.

In fact, Defra doesn’t want to set a scheme up for seven or 10 years and then just shrug when the flak comes its way, as it did with Countryside Stewardship. It wants to modify the ELM scheme as it goes along, continuing with T&T and pilots until we get a scheme that works.

If that’s true, and Defra has not concreted in the goalposts, scores of T&T and pilot results are going to be thrown into the mix, and it will have to pick and choose what it takes forward into ELM.

Defra has to get it right. To quote Bill Shankly again: “If you are first you are first; if you are second you are nothing.” With ELM, we will all need to be first.