The National Farmers Union (NFU) is the most successful representation body for agriculture and horticulture in England and Wales. Representing more than 46,000 farming and growing businesses, part of their mission is to champion British agriculture and horticulture, and campaign for a stable and sustainable future for British farmers.
In 2021, NFU released a report calling for urgent action in integrated water management to bring the nation’s water infrastructure up to date to better cope with extreme weather events, from flooding to drought.
It urges government, water companies and farmers to properly invest in water management as a critical response to climate change and shines a spotlight on the need to safeguard water and agricultural land for food production.
The report sets out why a long-term, collaborative approach is needed, and how the NFU is calling for farmers and land managers to be part of the solution and take on-farm action to help achieve these goals.
The Integrated Water Management Plan, describes how the series of floods and droughts across the country in recent years has once more highlighted the vulnerability of agriculture and horticulture to extreme weather and climate change. This vulnerability is exacerbated by the fact that farms and rural communities are often given a lower priority in the response to these events.
Understandably, funding for flooding currently prioritises urban areas and property. But this often leads to rural landowners experiencing a lack of maintenance of watercourses and coastal channels which results in more frequent, more extensive, and prolonged flooding events. This is an unsustainable and inequitable outcome, which causes damage to farming businesses and rural communities as well as impacting on the country’s ability to produce food in the short to medium term.
With farmers managing 70% of Englands land, they can provide essential ecosystem services and environmental benefits. Farming therefore, has a key role to play in flood management. Where farmers can provide a service in mitigating flood risk to help protect others (for example, by providing land that can be flooded seasonally to reduce the severity or frequency of flooding in urban areas downstream) this must be a coherent, planned element of total catchment management. likewise, farmers must be fairly compensated for delivering this service.