BY JIM WEBSTER

The problem with environmental schemes is that it can often be difficult to work out whether they are worth entering. Indeed, with some it will probably cost you more to take part because of the income you lose is larger than the money you’ll get back from the government. But every so often there is a scheme which throws into high relief exactly what the government feels you’re worth.

One fine example of this can be found in the new ‘Sustainable Farming Incentive’. Note that in this case ‘incentive’ may be something of a misnomer. But the example is ‘HRW1: Assess and record hedgerow condition.’ If you sign up for this, you’ll receive £3 per 100 metres for one side of an eligible hedgerow per year.

According to the scheme, the aim of this action is that you:

• understand the condition of your hedgerows
• effectively plan how they can be managed to improve their condition

To comply with the scheme, you must:

• assess the condition of all the hedgerows entered into this action
• produce a written hedgerow condition assessment record for these hedgerows It’s also important to realise when you have to do it.

Again, according to the scheme, you must:

• assess the condition of the hedgerows and complete a written hedgerow condition assessment record within the first 12 months of your SFI agreement
• review the condition of the hedgerows and update the hedgerow condition assessment record in each subsequent year of your SFI agreement

Now you might ask how the farmer is to do this. After all, the farmer will be inspected. If the inspector disagrees with how things are done, money can be clawed back. In fact, they may claw back a proportion of the total claim. So, you could lose more than just the money you got for recording your hedgerows.

This happened with cross compliance under the Basic Payment Scheme. Somebody with ten thousand acres of arable might have a handful of suckler cows for environmental grazing. If there were errors on the passports or ear tags of the cattle, the penalty was not on any money paid on the cows, the penalty was deducted across the entire payment made to the farm. So, in this case the penalty could be greater than the entire capital value of the suckler herd, never mind the income they generated. A lot of arable farmers dropped cattle very rapidly at one point.

All the RPA tell you in this scheme is:

“It’s up to you how you complete this action, as long as you do it in a way that can reasonably be expected to achieve this action’s aim. You can record the hedgerow condition assessment on paper or digitally. And finally, you must keep a written record of your hedgerow condition assessment. You must supply this evidence if we ask for it.”

Not a great deal of help to be honest. But the government did produce a ‘Hedgerow Survey Handbook.’  It was signed off by no lesser person than Barry Gardiner, Minister for Biodiversity, Landscape and Rural Affairs. In 2007. It goes into a lot of detail and is intended for far more in-depth surveys than these. But I think the topic headings will give us something to go on. After all these are all things that will doubtless exercise the interest of the RPA inspector. It asks questions like, is the hedge on a bank? Is there a fence, a ditch? What is the average herbaceous vegetation height? Are there any recently introduced, non-native species? Then there are the dimensions. It suggests estimating an average height and width. Now some of this could doubtless be taken from a photograph. As could the data as to whether there were any gaps greater than five meters wide. But how many photos are you going to need per 100m?

Then have to ask, how much time farmers are expected to take on this. Now here I can provide an answer. Defra employs both Administrative Assistants/Administrative Officers (AA/AO) who work in a supporting administrative role with no line management responsibilities. They also have Executive Officers (EO) who are involved in problem solving, business planning and policymaking. They can also hold individual responsibility for pieces of work within a programme or project.

Looking at the job descriptions, the fact that farmers have management responsibilities and indeed can also hold individual responsibility, puts them at the Executive Officer end of the spectrum. Obviously it’s difficult to turn an annual salary figure into an hourly rate, but we’re looking at from over £11 an hour for the AA/AO to over £13 an hour for the EO. Let’s compromise on £12 an hour. This means that if government is paying £3 per 100m, they expect that 100m be recorded in no more than 15 minutes.

The other alternative is unthinkable.

They cannot expect you to take more than 20 minutes per 100m. After all, what government official would expect a farmer to trudge along a hedgerow with notepad and camera, then get home and write everything up, for far less than the national minimum wage?

Jim Webster farms at the bottom end of South Cumbria. Jim was encouraged to collect together into a book some blog posts he’d written because of their insight into Cumbrian farming and rural life (rain, sheep, quad-bikes and dogs) It’s available here.