This article was originally published by Rhoda Wilson at The Daily Exposé.

A British farmer has said that the government has offered a scheme to pay farmers not to supply food for three years. This scheme is part of a larger trend where farmers are being financially incentivized by the state to reduce food production.  Why would they do that?

“We’ve been offered £2,500 to join a scheme for the next three years where we don’t supply you any food,” he said.

“I’m going to plow a field.  I’m going to put spring barley in.  I’m going to get £440 off the Government, per acre. Then when it comes to crop size, leave it [to] rot in the ground.

“So, I don’t get no straw for the cattle, you don’t get nothing for your bread, for everything we make.

“I can also plant bee mix which is for birds and bees.  I can plant wild bird seed which is for wild birds.

“I can also be paid to buy a tonne of bird seed, like anybody puts in their garden for the birds, and threw it out on the ground once a week.  I can get paid for that.

“My accountant says ‘do it’.  Because in doing that, I’ve not got to buy fertilizer – which since the Ukraine war it’s gone from £250 a tonne to £1,000 a tonne, so in order to fertilize your food I’ve got to buy fertilizer at £1,000 a tonne.

“So, I’ve now got a crop that I don’t have to spray, I don’t have to send nobody out there with a tractor, I don’t have to fertilize it or I can just leave it in the ground to rot.”

We were unable to establish details for when or where Andrew’s speech was given.  However, the government incentivization Andrews referred to has been in place for a couple of years and has been expanded and the incentives increased over time.

A scheme to pay farmers for actions they take, going beyond regulatory requirements, to manage their land in an “environmentally sustainable” way was set out by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (“Defra”) in their Agricultural Transition Plan 2021 to 2024.

Called the Sustainable Farming Incentive (“SFI”), the scheme is made up of a set of specified standards and is open to all farmers and occupiers with management control. It is one of three that make up the environmental land management (“ELM”) schemes, which replaced the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy.

The ELM schemes have the stated aim of “support[ing] the rural economy while achieving the goals of the 25-Year Environment Plan and a commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.”  This alone tells us that the schemes have dubious origins and motives.

SFI was launched by the UK government in 2022 following an earlier pilot.  In June 2023, the Government launched a “new and improved” SFI 2023 offering farmers additional actions and more flexibility to choose the actions they want to get paid for, offering more than twice as many new SFI actions as originally planned.

Incentivizing farmers to plant hedgerows instead of crops, Minister of State at Defra Sir Mark Spencer said: “There’s no minimum or maximum land area or hedgerow length, so farmers can choose how much land to cover with their SFI agreement.”

In September 2023, Defra posted a blog that demonstrated that they hadn’t thought through the dire consequences of their eco-activism:

Through SFI, our aim is to support farming and farmers. We want to protect and improve the environment, food production and food security. We obviously don’t want SFI to be used in a way that comes at a cost to any of them.

We know that sometimes sparing land for a year, or 2 or 3 can make food production more resilient and can support farmers to achieve better margins from their land. Some of our SFI actions do take land out of food production for a short time, which helps farmers do this.

The evidence shows that a small number of farmers, roughly 1% of those who applied for SFI in 2023, entered 80% or more of their farm into actions that involve taking land out of food production.

While flexibility and freedom of choice are important features of SFI, we think this goes further than is necessary. And, in the context of economic volatility and challenging weather conditions, there is a risk that this could become more of an issue.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive, UK Government, 13 September 2024

Defra’s warning about food security was issued in September 2023.  But this warning was ignored a few months later with the announcement of yet more upgrades to the scheme.

In November 2023, Steve Barclay was appointed the Secretary of State for Defra.  Within two months, he announced “the biggest upgrade to the UK’s farming schemes since leaving the European Union.”  These upgrades included:

Enhanced payments for ‘creation’ and ‘maintenance’ options to improve the long term incentives for farmers to create habitats and ensure they are rewarded for looking after habitats once they have created them.

Premium payments for actions with the biggest environmental impact or combinations of actions that deliver benefits at scale, such as £765 per hectare for nesting plots for lapwing, and £1,242 per hectare for connecting river and floodplain habitat.

Biggest upgrade to UK farming schemes introduced by the Government since leaving the EU, UK Government, 4 January 2024

In May 2024, the UK government finally realized their folly.  The scheme proved so popular to struggling farmers that the Government was forced to issue a crackdown, warning that growers could only take 25 percent of their land out of direct food production for environmental projects.

The Telegraph reported that Mark Spencer, the Minister of State for Food, Farming, and Fisheries, said the initiative “was always intended to be implemented on smaller areas of land … Food production is the primary purpose of farming and we are taking action to clarify this principle.”

Farmers, and the public at large, don’t need to be told that the primary purpose of farming is food production.  And farmers, and the public at large, would have implemented policies to support farmers to grow more food, not less.

Keith Andrews is not the only farmer issuing warnings about the Government’s policies.  In April, Jeremy Clarkson warned that farmers are being incentivized not to produce food and said he has stopped growing food in some of his fields because it is more profitable to take government eco handouts.

Writing in the Sunday Times magazine, he said: “I have signed up to the government’s eco-friendly grant scheme and will be planting things that aren’t food in three fields.

“They’re good for the soil and they’re good for my bank balance. But it means I’m not growing stuff people can eat,” Clarkson said.

“I know one chap who has taken 60 percent of his farm out of food production and he’s not alone. So, yippee. All that stored carbon and all of that fixed-in nitrogen.

“But what if you want some bread? You’ll have to get a loaf made from wheat that was grown abroad. And how’s that good for global warming?”

In the video below, Russel Brand highlighted the issue raised by Clarkson and asked, why would you incentivize farmers to not grow food?