Opinion: We need to think bigger when it comes to water

Every summer I host a group of students from my former favoured drinking establishment.

They are undertaking modules in technical crop management and I give them a walk-and-talk tour of the farm, stopping as we go to discuss all manner of important agronomic issues such as how on earth a dead mouse might come about blocking a Vaderstad drill coulter and which taxa of animal is eating all of our oilseed rape. 

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About the author

Mike Neaverson

News opinion writer

Mike Neaverson is a potato grower and independent agronomist from South Lincolnshire. After a spell in farm management, he set up his own business in 2017 and is also heavily involved with his family’s 300ha arable farm.

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We usually get talking about the weather. How many more years, I thought, do we have to stand around like this explaining about how arid it’s been, how unprecedented the heatwave is this spring, before we pull our collective finger out and do something about it?

Unprecedented is the new normal and even in this moisture-retentive part of the world, there will come a point in the not-too-distant future when every spring crop and most winter crops will benefit from the addition of water.

I think back to my spell as a 21-year-old working on a farm on the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand.

We may be a dozen degrees latitude further north than they are south, but our climatic conditions seem to be merging rather than diverging.

Those guys will irrigate every crop on the farm, including grass, several times a year. They will disagree, I’m sure, but I would describe their farming system as verging on hydroponic. 

One of the blocks of land that I worked on was irrigated with a network that I now realise is so ahead of its time that it deserves special mention.

The abridged story is that a group of farmers got together to pay for a huge pipe down from the mountains.

Because of the height of the infeed, water arrives at the farm gate at enormous pressure and in enormous quantities totally unpumped.

It provides clean water that is, once the capital has been paid off, nearly free. And all because someone had had the foresight to pull together a co-operative to invest in an economy of scale.

In the fens and elsewhere, we are going to be governed now and in the future by what water we can store in winter-fill reservoirs.

The parallels here are significant; the economies of scale of reservoir construction are enormous when you consider the volume to bank ratio, pump capacity and distribution pipework. Large estates can probably justify an irrigation network, but many smaller growers cannot. 

So, if your view is that our climate is going to get more extreme, and the benefits to water availability more profound, we probably ought to be thinking bigger. 

We ought to be thinking as a district; maybe half a dozen or more farmers clubbing together to build one big scheme covering several thousand hectares. Perhaps even this is not big enough.  

Policy could help massively. Government could start by straightening planning and permitting rules.

But fundamentally these large-scale infrastructure projects will be very expensive, into the million pounds apiece, and growers might struggle to raise the capital or justify it to an unwilling landlord or bank manager without assistance.

Instead of funding highly depreciating metal through rounds of grant schemes, a much better use would be to aid the construction of infrastructure projects like this.

The stuff that actually matters. Removing water from the system at times of flood in the winter is as much of a public good as food and business security.