Farmers in England will get new payments for cleaning up the waterways near their land, the environment secretary has said.<\/p>\n
Agricultural pollution affects<\/a> 40% of Britain\u2019s lakes and rivers, as fertiliser and animal waste washes off the land into waterways.<\/p>\n Speaking at the National Farmers\u2019 Union water summit at Beeston Hall farm in West Yorkshire, Steve Reed said his department would be launching changes to the sustainable farming incentive (SFI) scheme that replaced EU subsidies. The SFI, which pays farmers to look after the environment, was frozen this year in a surprise move<\/a>. The scheme is expected to reopen next year.<\/p>\n Reed said: \u201cWe also have to work with the farming sector to tackle pollution from agriculture. We are looking at how we can reform SFI so that when it opens in the new year there will be more actions in there focused on cleaning up water, because that\u2019s in the interests of the country as a whole, but it\u2019s also in the interests of the farming sector. So we\u2019ll have more to say on that.\u201d<\/p>\n He is expected to launch these changes by the end of summer.<\/p>\n The NFU announced it was starting a new programme that would work with scientists to help farmers measure the pollution in the waterways near their farms, so they could take steps to improve the water quality and see the progress.<\/p>\n The summit was held on the NFU vice-president Rachel Hallos\u2019s farm. On her land, which is owned by Yorkshire Water<\/a>, there are two reservoirs. Reed toured these and saw they were completely dry, which has raised concerns about water supply and food production in the area. Yorkshire was the first area of the UK to implement a hosepipe ban this summer. It is in drought after the driest spring on record.<\/p>\n The NFU president, Tom Bradshaw, said farmers were having to deal with weather extremes due to climate breakdown. He added: \u201cI think that, rather than being extreme, that is now the reality that we\u2019re all having to deal with, and that as farmers, we\u2019ve got to work out how we can mitigate the risk, how we can try and manage the situation so that we don\u2019t lurch from one catastrophic problem of not being able to plant out crops, then them flooding, or not having enough fodder because we haven\u2019t had the rainfall.\u201d<\/p>\n Reed suggested he might make it easier for farmers to build reservoirs on their land to hold water during dry conditions. He said planning had been \u201ctoo slow\u201d, adding: \u201cFarmers can\u2019t get on and build reservoirs that they need.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n The planet’s most important stories. Get all the week’s environment news – the good, the bad and the essential<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n He said: \u201cFarmers get caught in the planning system. We\u2019ve done work with the National Trust and RSPB where they are trusted partners and they don\u2019t have to apply for permission to dig ponds on their land any more. We aren\u2019t quite there yet with farmers we are coproducing policy but something could look like that.<\/p>\n \u201cThere isn\u2019t just one answer \u2013 we need farmers to be able to have ready access to water and that involves many different actions we could take. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so important to have conversations like those we are having today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Farmers in England will get new payments for cleaning up the waterways near their land, the environment secretary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299795,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-299794","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114933643695518922","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}