Climate change in Cornwall
I was asked to take part in a short video in West Cornwall to promote the CEE bill, with the aim to raise public awareness and get our Cornish MPs to vote in support of it. I was asked:
what environmental changes have I seen in farming in recent years?
More extreme weather - specifically heavy rainfall in shorter periods, and more gales if thats possible!
Is enough attention being paid to voices in farming?
Not to small/medium size farms or organic farms where it is far more likely there is more diversity and environmental care being taken. In fact there is discrimination occurring to farms that are already providing environmental benefits and wildlife opportunities - we generally have to pay for the privilege and do more paperwork, while farming that uses harmful products and abuses the soil gets paid to do so!
What does irreversible climate and ecological change mean for your livelihood in Cornwall?
Farming is all about the weather and landscape. The issue with climate change is that we don't know what that is going to look like, but we do know it is likely to get more erratic and more extreme - this poses all sorts of challenges for farmers. What we are doing is building as much resilience and diversity into our landscape as possible; planting mixed hedgerows, extending woodland and creating new coppices of a variety of tree species, creating more habitat and building our soils. This will hopefully enable the land to cope better with these changes and gives us, and future generations, options.
Comments