THE wheels are coming off the wagon for tenant farmers as the misdirection of subsidies and the ever shorter terms of rental agreements take their toll.

In response, Blanchland farmer Ken Lumley, wearing his hat as regional chairman of the Tenant Farmers’ Association, is now preparing to host a meeting at Hexham Mart that is part and parcel of a national campaign to make the powers-that-be sit up and listen.

Key to the campaign is promoting recognition of the term – and therefore the role –of “active farmers”. By definition, they are the people who occupy the land, are responsible for its day-to-day management and take the economic risks in doing so.

One of the biggest problems for tenant farmers today, though, is they don’t always receive the payments under the Common Agricultural Policy that they should –rather, by a fluke of bureaucracy, they are going to the land owners instead.

In the last round of CAP reforms, there was much talk of restricting support payments solely to active farmers. But in the end, what the TFA described as an “empty, box-ticking exercise” simply stopped airports, sports facilities and water companies from applying and failed to remedy the main problem.

Land owners can now access payments without even having a tenant, said Ken.

“The land owner just has to agree to let an area to someone to put a bit of stock on and then he can get the payment.

“There is an abundance of landlords in Scotland who have bought up farms and don’t do anything with them, but they can claim the payments – and we’re going that way.”

Another trend is for farms to be reclaimed by the land owners, the farmhouse separated off and sold at the highest price to otherwise urban dwellers, and the land rented to the farmer next door for grazing.

So, livestock is being spread ever more thinly over wider and wider tracts of land, with the resultant knock-on effect on biodiversity. The very aims of the agri-environmental payment schemes are hence being undermined by this failure to place a value on the role of livestock and grazing.

Ken said: “I can understand it from the land owners point of view when you’ve got a land agent saying ‘if you do this, you will earn more money’.

“But together all these little things are adding up and farming is just melting away. We’ve got to stop now and take stock of what is happening.”

The fact that the focus of the CAP payments over the past couple of decades has switched from livestock to the land has had a detrimental social effect, too.

He said: “If you go back to the 1960s and up to 1995, payments were based on the livestock and how many head of cattle and sheep you had, and that was money that went into the very roots of agricultural communities.

“But you get to 1995 and then foot-and-mouth and then a Labour government that was persuaded we didn’t need to have livestock on farms, because meat could be imported and, suddenly, environmental issues have become the focus of payments.

“Payments are now based on areas of land and the importance of livestock has been lost.”

The only thing of any real worth tenant farmers of the past owned – livestock – has now been devalued to the extent that when it is time to retire, they have nothing to fall back on.

“If you should be retiring, but you need to buy a house and haven’t got the capital to do so, then you just sit there and dam the whole system up. The old codgers can’t get out!”

The other major issue for tenant farmers today is quite simply the length of the tenancies available.

When Ken took over Newbiggin Farm in 1986 it was at a time when tenancies could be secured over three generations. The Agricultural Holdings Act that year restricted the term to one lifetime and then the Act of 1995 shortened it again.

“The average farm-business tenancy now is three years,” said Ken.

“And there are two round Hexham that, in recent years, have been let on annual tenancies – they have become grass parks.

“They are put out to the highest bidder and that person makes as much money as he can for a year.”

Some tenancies nowadays don’t require drainage, hedging or soil quality to be maintained, because such is the short-term nature of the tenure that the farmer is already getting precious little in return.

“You might have a really good tenant, but why is he going to invest in, say, a high quality fertiliser if he’s not going to be there next year?” said Ken.

The TFA aims to influence the next round of CAP talks to try to ensure all future payments go to active farmers.

Ken said: “The CAP payments are meant to be for the people doing the jobs and producing the food. They are not for people elsewhere to siphon off.”

The meeting at Hexham Mart will take place on Wednesday, February 24, at 7.30pm. There will be two guest speakers - Christopher Cooke, of Land and Livestock Management for Life, and chartered surveyor Richard Brown.

Places can be booked by ringing Jenna Kirkpatrick on (0118) 9306130.