Cumbrian farmers could benefit from nitrate changes (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Cumbrian farmers could benefit from nitrate changes

9:00am Saturday 20th March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

HUNDREDS of farmers in South Lakeland could now be exempt from the Nitrate Vulnerable Zones restrictions after Defra agreed to revise the scheme.

Defra will redraw some of its zones in Cumbria after receiving 750 appeals nationwide against the NVZ designations, good news for many farmers who would have been forced to pay out thousands of pounds for slurry storage in order to prevent it from polluting waterways.

Farmers in the designated zones - areas of land that drain into nitrate-polluted waters - would have to increase their slurry storage capacity and invest in much larger tanks at an average cost of around £30,000 per farm, in order to cut the risk of polluting waterways.

Defra has admitted there were flaws in the process and will publish a revised map ‘soon’, a move that Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron has backed.

The Liberal Democrat farming spokesman said: “The appeals process has cast a lot of doubt on how well the designation method has been operating and exposed an awful lot of mistakes.

“The fact that the Government is prepared to make exemptions is certainly a positive step but the cost of these new rules will still be unaffordable for many farmers at an already difficult time for them.

“The government should rethink their entire NVZ strategy-starting by exempting all farmers in the Kent Estuary from these regulations.”

From January last year, the area of England covered by NVZs increased from 55 per cent to about 70 per cent, with the new designations in place until December 2012.

The issue of NVZs was highlighted in last week’s farming pages in The Westmorland Gazete, with news of Holker Hall Estates investing £2 million into a new renewable energy plant, allowing its farmers to store slurry there should they be placed in an NVZ in the future.

A Defra spokesman said the zones were developed alongside the Environment Agency in consultation with an expert panel including representatives from the farming and water industries.

“We will look at the Independent Appeals Panel’s decisions, alongside other information and evidence, in the next review of the Nitrates Action Programme in 2012,” he said.

An Environment Agency spokesperson said agency officials ‘stood by’ the methodology and remained confident it was ‘rigorous and robust’.