Many UK arable farmers are facing bad harvests this year as a result of the rain. Watching a brief report on our local news I heard Hilary Benn (Environment Secretary) saying he was going to lift the ban on farmers working on waterlogged land.
What ban is this? I thought. Who forbids farmers to gather harvests on wet fields? Got it in one - the European Union.
A quick search on the net turned up the culprit - The Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition standard GAEC 3. These people think of everything.
What ban is this? I thought. Who forbids farmers to gather harvests on wet fields? Got it in one - the European Union.
A quick search on the net turned up the culprit - The Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition standard GAEC 3. These people think of everything.
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1 comment:
Hi.
Not all EU laws are bad. Some are there for a purpose.
The GAEC 3 is there to protect soils from compaction, hardening and thus excess rainwater run-off which makes gullies and increases leaching of valuable fertiliser from the surface as well as reducing the soil's ability to breathe.
Farmers, as "custodians of the land" and being in intimate contact with nature, would presumably know about all this and ensure they didn't compact the land, increasing run-off etc.
Obviously, not all of them care so much for our environment as we'd like - hence the directive.
In Devon and Somerset it used to be normal for huge brown rivers to cascade from every farm gateway when it rained. All the gullies were where the tractor wheels had been. The rest of the field would be soggy but in-gullied.
It's noticeable that there's a lot less nowadays, so thanks for bringing this to my attention - I wondered why...
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