Hedging rules will penalise us, south-west farmers fear

West Country farmers fear they will be unfairly penalised by new rules requiring hedges to be remapped before producers can use them to receive full support payments.

A patchwork of smaller fields means mapping is likely to take longer in south-west England than in other regions – potentially delaying payments to farmers who choose to include hedges in ecological focus areas (EFA) that must be established on 5% of arable land in return for subsidies.

“If it is going to delay payments, we are not accepting it,” said NFU Cornwall delegate Martin Howlett. “It is going to push people to the brink if we are not going to get our payment on 1 December, and instead it is March or April or even later.”

See also How CAP reform will affect UK livestock farmers

The new “greening” rules are due to come into effect from 1 January 2015. Farmers were willing to accept change, but it would be a “triple whammy” to see payments delayed when producers were already contending with bovine TB and a collapse in beef prices, warned Mr Howlett.

“This has come at totally the worst time at all for south-west livestock producers,” he told Farmers Weekly.

Defra should take a light-touch approach while the new system was bedding in so West Country farmers were not put at a disadvantage, he added.

“We are proud of our hedges – they are part of our heritage and exactly what environmentalists want to see. They are there for agricultural purposes as well as for wildlife, but the fact they have to be remapped yet again is just bizarre.”

See also CAP reform

Defra secretary Owen Paterson has cautioned farmers against using hedges as landscape features that count towards EFAs if they want to receive timely payments. Instead, he has suggested farmers choose from four other options.

Those options include letting land lie fallow, establishing catch crops or cover crops, growing nitrogen-fixing crops or establishing buffer strips. But questions remain over the definition of these options and their suitability for some farms – as well as how hedges will be measured.

Jo Broomfield, director of Defra’s CAP delivery programme, said: “If we can find an easy way within the regulations to allow people just to take the average width of their hedge, we will do so.

“We certainly don’t want to want to be in the game of trying to map the variations in hedge width over time or at any time. Hopefully in the next few weeks we will release some guidance that we can get some views on.”