Environmental Stewardship

Natural England re-thinks Stewardship

3/11/07

Over the autumn Natural England has been taking stock of its new Environmental Stewardship schemes. These were introduced after the 2003CAP reform and are split between a broad and shallow Entry Level Scheme, designed for all farmers, and a Higher Tier competitive scheme, which aims to be more specific and tackle complex conservation objectives.  The Entry Level Scheme is straightforward. Basically a farmer chooses from a list of options those that will contribute to conservation on his farm and agrees to manage them appropriately.

Options include hedgerows, ditches, grass buffer strips, conservation headlands, bird seed strips and over-wintered stubbles. The farmer adopts a selection, accumulating points, until he reaches a threshold governed by the size of his farm. For many farmers existing hedgerows and other features will contribute to the total but he will usually have to put in other conservation measures as well. The scheme was designed this way because one of the drawbacks with the previous Countryside Stewardship had been that it did not support existing habitat and only funded new features. Thus perversely a farm could get money for a new hedge but not maintaining an existing one.  

The review carried out for Natural England and Defra by the government research institute CSL suggests that the Entry Level Scheme (started in 2005) is going well but it could do better. The principle area where it could do better is persuading farmers to take a more balanced set of options so that field-living plants and animals benefit as well as those that live in hedgerows. The evidence is that farmers tend to go for options that interfere least with their operations and these are usually things like hedgerows and buffer strips. This convenience factor seems to be more important than the reward of more points for trickier options. It is quite likely that Natural England will try and rectify this in some way, possibly by requiring farmers to pick options from a range of categories rather than just allowing them to take what is convenient.  This would be sensible.

The real challenge is going to be maintaining the momentum. So far the up-take by farmers has been good and in mid year it looked like it would reach its target of 60% of all farmers by the end of 2007. In recent months, however, this has dropped off and the scheme could well miss the target. The sudden and dramatic increase in cereal prices is probably to blame, so the future is problematic. While Natural England would like Stewardship to deliver more wildlife the whole thing looks much less rewarding to arable farmers than it did a year ago. With set-aside going as well prospects are not rosy for many farmland birds and mammals.