Latest news with #SarahGodwin
BBC News
2 days ago
- Climate
- BBC News
Dairy farmers face crisis as drought causes grass fails
Dairy farmers are facing a crisis, spending thousands of pounds feeding their cattle grain that should be saved for the year's long, dry spring - the warmest and sunniest on record - has forced many farmers to take unprecedented action. Sarah Godwin, a dairy farmer in north Wiltshire, has had to take feed out to her cows for the first time in her life. She said she had "never known a season like this, never known the heat, the lack of rain, and for so long".Professor Nicola Cannon from the Royal Agricultural University blamed the record dry spring, which is "warming the fastest of all seasons". When I arrived at Mrs Godwin's family dairy farm near Chippenham, they were taking breakfast out to their like a lot of West Country dairy farms, the cows are out in the fields all summer, just grazing on rich natural not this year."The grass is completely dried up," Mrs Godwin explained. "There's no goodness in it, it's just completely stalky with no nutritional value at all." When the tractor comes through the gate, pulling a rack of rich cattle feed, the cows run alongside. They know what is coming, and they can't rack is soon invisible, lost in a crowd of happy cows, all feasting on the perfect nutritional ration of they shouldn't be eating this till October at least, when the grass is gone and they come inside.I asked Mrs Godwin if she had ever had to do this before."Never," she said quickly.I have heard this is happening on dairy farms across the West Country, as the long dry spring turned into a hot summer, and the grass faded. To find out exactly what is going on, I went to an experimental test field in Gloucestershire. A classic grazing meadow, fringed by beech trees. It is tended by experts from the Royal Agricultural University, and scrutinised by Prof Cannon."Look at these stems," she showed me, grasping a handful of brown grass."If this was cut for hay, you see how there is no leaf on it?"It's the leaf which contains the sugar, which is the tasty bit, the nutritious bit." They say you should make hay while the sun shines, and farmers have been doing just that. But many have found hay that is crisp and dry, even powdery. There just are not enough leaves on the Wiltshire, yields are down 50%.The summer is now here in earnest, the Met Office has officially declared heat it is not summer that has done the damage, it was Office figures show spring 2025 was the warmest and sunniest on record, and the driest since 1893."And spring is the most important season for plant growth," explained Prof Cannon."So even when the sun came, the grass can't use that energy, because it never grew properly in the first place."Back on Mrs Godwin's farm, the cows are settling down for a nap after their healthy breakfast, unaware how the climate is changing around them.I asked her how they will cope, how they will change in the long smiled ruefully, "I don't know Dave, maybe we should grow wine instead?" What is climate change? Climate change is the long-term shift in the Earth's average temperatures and weather world has been warming up quickly over the past 100 years or so. As a result, weather patterns are 2015 and 2024, global temperatures were on average around 1.28C above those of the late 19th Century, according to the European Copernicus climate the 1980s, each decade has been warmer than the previous one, the UK Met Office year 2024 was the world's hottest on record, with climate change mainly responsible for the high was also the first calendar year to surpass 1.5C of warming compared to pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus.
BBC News
27-03-2025
- Business
- BBC News
SFI cuts leave 'thousands' of farmers facing losses says NFU
There is growing anger among farmers who have missed out on thousands of pounds after the government stopped payments for environmental Wiltshire dairy farmer said she now faces a "massive black hole" in her finances after the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme was closed National Farmers' Union said "thousands of farmers" had lost farming minister insisted the scheme was "now fully subscribed" and would be "reformed". Sarah Godwin and her family farm several hundred acres of Cotswold pasture, west of Chippenham. Like many, she had been working on improving the fields to boost biodiversity and help insects and bees thrive."If we were going all out for cash," she explained, "We'd just plant one type of high-yield grass."To a townie like me, her fields all just look like grass. But not all grass is the a high-yield grass variety, with fertilisers and sprays, and your cows will produce more milk. But insects, pollinators and birds will the Godwins were planning to plant a wide variety of herbs, wildflowers and grasses, called 'herbal leys'. These are less commercially profitable, as the cows will make less milk."But they are better for soil health, better for pollinators, better for the environment," Sarah explained. To encourage farmers to plant fields like this, the government's SFI scheme paid compensation, at £382 per Godwins had nearly finished the lengthy application process."We'd spent months putting the application together, we'd paid over £1,000 in agent's fees, we were just doing the final checks," she said."Then the government shut the applications down, without any warning."Losing the SFI grants will cost them a lot of money."For us it tens of thousands of pounds of lost income. We now have a massive black hole in our budget for this year," added Mrs Godwin. Are the Godwins alone? No, says Tom Collins, another Wiltshire farmer, and county chair of the National Farmers' Union."There were thousands of farmers who wanted to join the scheme and support nature," he told many, he too had changed his farm to improve biodiversity. He showed me a field ploughed and planted up for wheat, but with a six-metre strip left wild round the edge, up to an old Cotswold stone wall."This is great for birds and bugs," he said. "The sprays for the wheat don't touch this strip, it's 300 metres long." Obviously he will lose money on the land where wheat is not growing, so Mr Collins had also applied for the SFI funding. He had managed to get his application in earlier, and was successful. There was no published deadline, just a rolling said there were "thousands of farmers" who wanted to join the scheme, but then, without warning, it was closed to new applications."It's a huge shock to the industry. The SFI is a huge lifeline for a lot of businesses. Doing that nature work on their farm, guaranteed to be paid for that work is a huge cashflow benefit."So what is the government's rationale for this sudden closure to an environmental support scheme? The government insists that the SFI scheme has been such a success it has simply used up its for Food Security and Rural Affairs Daniel Zeichner said: "More farmers are now in schemes and more money is being spent through them than ever before."It's understood that a new "reformed" scheme will be introduced in 2026, with applications opening in the summer of Zeichner said the revised scheme would "align" with the government's land use framework and contribute to the priorities of food, farming and meantime, the NFU says thousands of farmers will have no choice but to plough up the land they had set aside for Collins said: "These farmers are going to have to go for it, they're going to have to farm all these areas, and maximise their farming output, because they can't do the environmental work. "Nature will be the loser, as well as the farmers."
