PROTECTING and preserving the environment is now a cause celebre among agricultural policy makers in Britain as well as in Europe. Breaking the link between production and farm payments in pursuit of that goal now looks a certainty since both Sir Don Curry's blueprint for British agriculture and Franz Fischler's mid-term review of the European CAP made separation a central plank of their plans.

The prospect may make many people nervous, but the success of one scheme which has been running in the Lake District for the last ten years, may give some cause for optimism.

FOR ten years now the Lake District Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme has been helping farmers with the cost of keeping the famous landscape the way people want it to be.

At 250,000 hectares, it is the largest of 22 ESA schemes up and down the country. Within its boundaries, from Caldbeck in the north to Cartmel in the south and from Egremont in the west to Shap in the east, more than 1,000 farmers get help with the costs of maintaining walls, hedges and buildings as well as qualifying for payments for tree planting, coppicing, pond restoration and the like.

Alan Clarke and his wife, Michelle, of Low Longmire Farm overlooking Windermere and Troutbeck, signed up to the ESA when they took over the tenancy in 1993 and have just signed up for another ten years.

According to Alan, the scheme has been a benefit to the business.

ESA agreements do impose restrictions, such as needing permission to spray thistles and nettles or spread certain types of fertiliser on certain categories of land.

"We can live with that," said Alan, who explained that, on the plus side, there had been payments for hedging, fencing and repairing hundreds of metres of dry stone wall and grants towards re-roofing two barns which would otherwise have gone to rack and ruin.

"The way farming has been over the last few years, they are jobs that would probably not have been done," said Alan, "Things have been very, very tight for everybody so the money comes in handy for that sort of thing."

As well as those tangible on-farm benefits, Alan said the ESA money also made its way into the wider local economy by way of walling contractors and building firms carrying out some of the work. And, he said, ESA payments were helping to maintain the picturesque Lake District landscape.

Indeed, with all the talk of farmers being rewarded for environmental goods rather than just for food production, the Government's ESA scheme, and the Countryside Stewardship Scheme (CSS) now look well ahead of their time.

The money for the ESA and CSS may not come directly from farm support payments, but it does come from the rural funding pot and the principle is broadly similar.

Whatever happens, changes to the support payment regime are bound to move in a similar direction: "It's going that way," said Alan, Some say by 2006 and some say by 2013, nobody really knows yet, but Franz Fischler has made it clear it has to come some time."

According to him though, if the final formulation can match the success of the ESA schemes, the change might even present an opportunity rather than a threat.

In the meantime, the future for the ESA and CSS is not exactly clear. Since January last year the Government reviewing its agri-environment schemes with the intention of restructuring the ESA and CSS and other smaller schemes.

DEFRA told the Gazette that, although the review is not due to be completed until December 2003, it aims to make a new scheme accessible to more farmers at entry level and combine the best of existing ESA and CSS into a single higher level. In the meantime, the ministry says existing ESA and CSS members should not fear signing new agreements; and applications for first-time entrants will be open as normal.

The NFU agreed that the Lake District ESA has worked well but it was concerned that, when the Government re-ordered its agri-environment scheme, it must strike the right balance and keep the good bits of the existing schemes and ensure that farmers already involved did not lose out.

February 14, 2003 10:00