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Farming Today: 01/06/23 Dartmoor farming, water shortages, poppies for medicine

01/06/23 Dartmoor farming, water shortages, poppies for medicine

BBC Radio 4 - Farming Today, 01/06/23 Dartmoor farming, water shortages, poppies for medicine

Grazing on Dartmoor, storing water, and growing poppies for medicine.

Natural England tells farmers they don't need to reduce livestock numbers on Dartmoor just yet. Storing water on farms. Producing poppies for medicine.

There's been a truce in the row over sheep on Dartmoor.  Farmers were told they must radically reduce the number of sheep and other livestock on common land if they wanted to remain in government schemes. Natural England wrote to commons associations which cover much of Dartmoor, offering rollovers of existing Higher Level Stewardship Schemes, farmers said the new agreements would not allow winter grazing, and the number of animals on the land in the summer had to be reduced, on some commons by an average of 75 percent.  Farmers said that wasn’t viable and protested, others called it re-wilding by the backdoor and the Farming Minister agreed to an Independent Review.  Now, following a parliamentary debate and some meetings, Natural England is proposing a one-year extension to existing stewardship agreements with no reduction in livestock numbers in most areas and then further four year agreements which will take into account the results of the review. 

Farmers in the East of England have faced water shortages for some time, but now there's a pilot project to try and tackle shortages in the West. South West Water and the Westcountry Rivers Trust are looking at paying farmers to store water on their land to help reduce demand during droughts.  

All week we're looking at farming pharma - the pharmaceutical products which are produced on farm, some as by-products and others as a crop in their own right. Poppies were grown here for medicine until the UK's only processing plant was closed back in 2016. Now farmers need a licence to send poppies to be processed for medicine abroad. They say they've been asking the Home Office for one for years, but still can't grow their crops for the medicinal market.

Presenter = Charlotte Smith
Producer = Rebecca Rooney

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