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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, I have enjoyed the parts of the debate I have heard. I was particularly pleased by the speech from our Front Bench of my noble friend Lady Scott. Like everyone else, I wish the Minister well and hope that he does his best to remember that agriculture is quite important. He represents Defra, which is an extraordinary name—the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It used to be the Ministry of Agriculture. In this case, the Government could not bear to bring in "farming and agriculture", so it had to be "food and rural affairs". It is a very sensible name, I suppose, but I hope that it will not lead to a neglect of the many problems from which agriculture suffers today. More than half a million farmers and their spouses work full time in agriculture. If one adds to that figure their families, the support industries and engineering and so on, one realises that agriculture is a significant part of the economy. An industry that produces 70 per cent of our food deserves a little more attention than Defra seems to have given to it in the past. We have seen an extraordinary policy called "modulation". It means taking away cash from the pure farmer and doing something else with it which is considered wholly admirable. What is being ignored is that the countryside to which many people and the Minister want to go back was made for practical purposes. It was farming as it changed the landscape in the great development days of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It was quite a different thing. Farmers planted hedges to keep in the cattle or the sheep. They planted the hedges also. If you were growing barley and you had partridges, it was economically important that you could let that land for shooting. Shooting partridges over a hedge is a very enjoyable sport if you kill them cleanly, which I sometimes did. All of that was part of a whole scheme. You cannot separate agriculture from the environment all together and place it in a secondary position. Agriculture is suffering from some extraordinary things. We have a European Parliament motion, which has become a definite intention, to restrict hours of work. An exception must be made for agriculture. There are three times in a year when any farmer must work all the hours he can. One of those is harvest, because the weather is a little uncertain. When weather is good, your combine must go ahead. The others are the two seeding times. In spring, it is very important to get the crop in early. Autumn grain plays an immense part now. In that case as well, you have to get the crop in early. The hours cannot be restricted. If you think you can get an extra combine driver just like that, you will find that it is quite impossible. The farmer does it himself. If he is doing it himself, he has no replacement. There are many other curious irritations. A very interesting little case has been brought to my attention by the NFU. It concerns organic farming. I am not against organic farming. I am doubtful about all the claims that are made about it, but if it produces stuff that the public want and it can be sold, I am all for it. Under the set-aside rules, farmers who have some but not all of their land in organic production—the majority of them fall into that category—will not be allowed to touch the set-aside after 1 May. They have to leave it there and let the weeds grow and spread to their other crops, further lowering their yields. This is surely nonsense and the kind of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, will have to tackle if we are going to get sensible rules. There are some very curious things about the incentives to improve the environment. One of the schemes of which I have heard encourages farmers in Scotland, and perhaps in England, to grow their grain and their oats in the old-fashioned way. They will receive a small subsidy if they grow 10 acres of oats, cut it with a binder, "stook" it or stack it, and then thrash it. The cost of doing that, given labour costs today, would be enormous. I cannot see what good that would do the countryside. It appears to me to be ridiculous. I do not intend to speak for very long but I must finish with one pathetic story of a farm of 75 acres in Scotland called Browndykes, so the farmer is called Broonie. He runs his 75 acres himself. He does the right thing and augments his income by growing some very good potatoes, Golden Wonders, which are well known in Scotland. He grows only half an acre of potatoes but he markets them and people travel for miles to buy them. He has 100 hens which lay brown eggs which he markets. His main business is rearing calves for beef. Happily, there is still a subsidy for that. He applied for a premium but was told that he was trying to cheat and that he would not get the £140 but would be fined £1,400, which would come off his subsidy. That was a major part of his quite small income. The reason he was fined was that he defined an animal wrongly. Most noble Lords may know what a heifer is. However, the definition of "heifer" in the major agricultural journals such as the Scottish Farmer and the Farmers Weekly is a cow which has had only one calf. It does not become a full cow until it is on its second calf. That is absolutely common throughout the agricultural journals. The journalist who told me about that—he is my nephew by the way—also checked the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It is quite clear that a heifer is, "a young cow, esp. one that has not had more than one calf". However, the European Union and Defra say that that definition is wrong and that my friend Broonie with his 75 acres, on which he has worked hard and which he has looked after, is a criminal. He was fined £1,400—a fortune for him. Surely Defra and the European Union can take the definition of a heifer in the same way as it is defined by the people who own and buy them.