Environment Agency neglect has lead to floodwater backing up

By Michael Wigan
Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 19/09/2008

Britain's tragically swamped farmland is often a self-inflicted woe, claim farmers.

Years of neglected draining by the Government's Environment Agency (EA) have resulted in blocked watercourses causing floodwater to back up and take longer to reach the sea.This is a side-effect of the fashion embraced by Government agencies and championed by conservation charities for minimal land management or active reversion to pre-modern farming landscapes.

Dr Helen Phillips of Natural England, articulating these policies, has talked about the need to create more floodplains, restore wetlands by blocking-up old drainage channels, and allow rivers to find their own courses.
Sadly, this is incompatible with food-growing, reducing carbon emissions, and the management of land for the delivery of benefit to humans. Supposedly for the sake of wildlife habitat, 're-wilding', as some call it, looks non-sensical to food producers.
Summer flooding has put this whole approach to land management under pressure. The Government's soggy silence over the woes of farming betrays an anxiety that a link will be made between the failure of the nation's harvest, soil losses, and farmers' inability to get onto land and sow next season's crop, and their own whacky policies.
Have they made the effects of bad weather worse? If so, when will insurance companies be asking them what they are up to?
One area in agony is East Yorkshire. Arable farmer David Curtis claims that on his 650 acre farm near Driffield there would have been no flooding at all if drains had been properly maintained. As it is, he has lost 20 acres of wheat worth, say, £10,000, food lost to the nation.
Mr Curtis says it is all politics. Reeds in drains used to be cut by local drainage boards. No more. Drains used to be dredged allowing water to get to sea and soils to dry out for cropping and sowing. No more. 'One wonders', he asks, 'Whether management is up to the job?'
With Yorkshire bluntness Mr Curtis says: 'It has nothing to do with global warming. This is about practical realities.' He points out that he, like all farmers, has invested in tile-draining in herring-bone patterns to aereate and drain land, and make it workable.
However, tile-drains have to debouche into a free-flowing watercourse. Now, he says, the pressure from blocked flood-land is pressurising his drains, filling them with silt, and rendering them useless.
Is the problem a wrong philosophy? 'It's a disease', he says.
When the first floods hit East Yorkshire in early August the EA, under pressure to help, brought in weed-cutting machinery. They machined some weed away and departed. But they omitted to cut downstream, so water backed up again. 'Their own drivers think they're crazy', claims Curtis.
The solution? 'We need a simple programme maintained year-on-year, clearing reeds, keeping banks clean, and dredging away siltation', says Curtis.
Local chartered surveyor John Atkinson makes a distinction between the local drainage boards which are efficient and have good people, and the boffins in the EA besotted with their unworldly dreams of re-creating mediaeval landscapes.
He cites a drainage problem photographed in the Yorkshire Post where water merely trickled to the sea from a blocked ditch against a panorama of damaged flood-land.
He says the River Hull is flowing, even in today's flood conditions, at half its normal size. Trees are left lying over, or in, the river, in purist devotion to the laissez-faire ideal.
Mr Atkinson cites the contradictory fact that local farmers on lower land still pay drainage rates but for a service often abandoned.
The consequence of all this, in Mr Atkinson's view, is that: 'Large areas of arable land will go out of production.'
It seems hardly possible that we will be importing more grains from over the world, in ships belching bunker fuel emissions, because we decline to clean the drains here at home.
Then, abandoning land to the encroaching sea might also seem strange, and yet it is national policy in parts of East Anglia.
The RSPB at its famous Titchwell Reserve in Norfolk, pre-empting natural events, intends to move back a defensive sea-wall and allow the sea to roll in.
Paul Temple of the NFU, whose telephone has been getting hot with farmers watching flood levels edge up the cabs of their marooned combines and tractors, says: 'Make no mistake, there is real frustration with this policy from land users.'
He says that with rising food imports and land being lost to development, 'We cannot afford at this time to have unnecessary flooding and land not to drain properly.' Surreally, some EA officials have told him that draining is retrogressive and does not work.
It might be worth telling that to the Dutch, who reclaimed the polders and using hand-tools and windmills won an extra third of their sovereign territory from the sea.
What gives an even nastier twist to the dilemma facing farmers here is that under new good stewardship rules farmers could be prosecuted for soil-loss and lose entitlement to supports for their environmental stewardship.
Until around ten years ago farmers remember drainage board workers walking the drains in winter-time armed with spades and brush- cutters. Now farmers feel that management is determined by theoretical models, and conducted from hidden bunkers.
If Britain is to feed itself to a greater extent and narrow the yawning gap in food sufficiency, someone will have to get back into those drains and start the laborious task of winning back the free passage of water.
Tim Rymer of JSR Farms at Southburn in Yorkshire sums up, 'The EA objective should be to get water away from where it shouldn't be to where it should be, and fast.'
Otherwise, as summers get wetter, we can look forward to more coffee-coloured floodwater over farmland, less crop, more property damage, and an even more stricken food production sector.