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Navarian@lemm.ee

Mark Drakeford: Not up to farmers to decide how subsidies spent (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 2 years ago by Navarian@lemm.ee to c/wales@lemm.ee

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Wales' outgoing first minister has defended plans to ask farmers to plant trees on their land in return for cash.

Mark Drakeford spoke following recent go-slow protests sparked by proposed changes to how agriculture is subsidised.

The Welsh Labour leader said farmers could not simply decide themselves what to do with millions in subsidies.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I wonder if the subsidies necessarily make sense as structured.

Increasing tree cover in a distributed fashion might help slow the rate of water runoff or increase the rate of carbon storage.

But they aren't going to be ideal from a habitat standpoint. Instead of having 10% of land on each farm converted to trees, it'd maybe be better to have 10% of farms, chosen in contiguous blocks, converted to forest. Like, have the government offer to buy farms adjacent to existing woodland to expand it.

googles

It looks like there's a separate initiative to create contiguous woodland in Wales:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Forest_for_Wales

The National Forest for Wales (Welsh: Coedwig Genedlaethol i Gymru) is a long-term forestation programme by the Welsh Government, aiming to form a network of woodland throughout Wales.[2]

[–] Navarian@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

I think they're not looking into specifics with each farm in this case, which is a large part of the reason many of the farmers here are struggling to understand/accept the proposals.

Time will tell if the Welsh Government intends to ignore that issue or if they want to try and work with the farmers in situations where having 10% of their land as forest is unreasonable/impossible, whatever the reason.