Farmers across the region say they are 'befuddled' by the pace of government legislation changes following Brexit.
Victoria Eveleigh, an Exmoor farmer and writer brought up in London, spoke at the Dulverton Literary Festival this month about the challenges facing South West farmers in the wake of Brexit and the new environmental land management scheme (ELM).
The ELM is part of the move from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, which the government says 'are essential to help us grow and maintain a resilient, productive agriculture sector over the long term and at the same time achieve our ambitious targets for the environment and climate, playing our role in tackling these huge, global challenges.'
"We seem to have been consulted a lot," she said. "Either there are so many different viewpoints, but sometimes, you must sit down and make hard decisions. We've got to listen to each other, but at some point, we've got to sit down and make sensible, wise decisions about compromises.
"You can't have things necessarily being better for wildlife and then let everybody discover and explore the bit you are trying to improve for wildlife. You can't have increased food production but decreased inputs.
"When I was at Wye Agricultural College, John Nix, our supervisor, had a wonderful end-of-term speech, a spoof politician saying, 'what we need is increased production and decreased inputs'. Everybody went 'hurrah,' but then we heard Michael Gove say it. Then you thought… 'well'."
Eveleigh, who lives on West Ilkerton Farm near Lynton with her husband Chris, said that farmers were "a bit befuddled" by the pace of change and the lack of clarity from the government. She said ELM had become "so complicated" that only the big farmers who could afford the best land agents would benefit, while small farms would struggle to keep up.
"That's part of the thing about everybody having their say in it," she continued. "They've tried to be all things through all weather.
"They've bolted on bits and things, and it's become so complicated that only the big farmers who can afford the best land agents will make most of the money from it. Small farms don't have the resources to engage with that.
"Land agents have told me they will be taking up most people's money just doing all the little bits and pieces, and there'll be nothing left for the farmers at the end of the day. That is the worry that the argument against the basic payment scheme, where you were more or less paid per the land you owned, they wanted to move away from that because that favoured the big landowners. But how ELM is going now will favour the big landowners even more."
She continued: "It's all so muddled at the moment."
She said about the future of her farm: "This year, our basic payment scheme has been cut again. It's always been the case that hill farmers have also had to do other things. There's that whole saying on Exmoor that to make a living, you've got to make three livings. That's always been the case, and people have diversified and done B&B and that sort of thing, but there are many very worried people now who need help knowing which way to turn.
"Things keep changing. For example, our land agent calculated that we'd be better off in higher-level stewardship than countryside stewardship last year. Within a year, that has completely changed, and we're very disadvantaged. It's a tough thing to keep on top of everything. What you need in farming is that certainty that what you're doing now will reap benefits in five years."
She also said that farmers needed more certainty and recognition for the positive things they had done for the environment and the local culture in the past 30 years. She noted that Exmoor was a unique area with a deeply embedded culture of hunting and farming, which outsiders sometimes misunderstood or ignored.
"We do farm visits, and the knowledge people have is a complete mixture," she explained. "A lot of people are amazed by everything. Some people are bored. Some are aggressively anti-farmer.
"That thing of culture is sometimes missing and the peculiarities of an area, local breeds and all the rest. Exmoor is very different from all the other National Parks.
"Exmoor was founded on a royal hunting forest. Like it or not, the culture of Exmoor is still very much bound by hunting, agriculture, and, along the coast, maritime influence and trade with Wales. There's a deeply embedded culture of hunting and farming, both of which are somewhat controversial if you look at Twitter."
Eveleigh, a successful author of children's books about horses and ponies, said that she had always longed to live in the country and have many animals. She said that she and her husband kept Exmoor Horn sheep, North Devon cattle and Exmoor ponies, dogs, cats and riding horses.
She said that she had been thinking a lot about what the countryside was for and that it was sustaining life for humans and other living beings. She said that farmers had to provide food, water, leisure activities, and everything else for the urban areas while also sustaining the lives of the people who lived in the countryside. She said that this was a huge ask and that farmers needed more support and understanding from the government and the public.
"I think I've been fortunate in that I was brought up in London," she added. "A lady spoke on Radio Four recently, saying that the countryside was irrelevant when she was in London. That was almost the case when I was in London.
"I went to university and wrote awful essays on agriculture when I knew nothing about it, which were poorly researched. Then, having married a farmer and being involved in farming, you see the other side. You see that most of what you can learn about managing the land, tending livestock, and agriculture in general can't be learned in a library or lecture theatre.
More than any other profession, there's a disconnect between theory and practice, and perhaps that follows through into legislation. It's the people who studied the theory who then legislate. It is a complicated problem, but farmers must be included in discussing what happens to the land."
She concluded by talking about Exmoor, saying: "When we started farming 40 years ago, it was the era of hedged payments where farmers were paid for the animals, and there was a lot of use of fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides and overstocking which drove down prices because there were lower quality animals.
"Since then, the environmentally sensitive area schemes came in, and there has been a change in attitude. Things have improved so much; we see more wildlife, and things have grown all over Exmoor.
"The attitude of farmers and what they're doing has been hugely positive in the past 30 years. I don't think that's acknowledged enough, and it's not being recognised sufficiently in the ELM, where you are always rewarded for change and not for the positive things people have been doing already."
