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> Do they get paid for taking care of bees on their land? In the U.K. at least, they do. The government pays you to leave some part of your field unused and un

> Do they get paid for taking care of bees on their land? In the U.K. at least, they do. The government pays you to leave some part of your field unused and untouched. It’s called ‘wilding’ and it’s well paid enough that the subsidy sometimes is worth more than any reasonable crop that would grow on that patch of land. Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm (of Top Gear fame) had a segment on this. My take is that farming is a very subsidy-heavy business.

acatnamedjoe 5y ago
Adding some slight nuance to this as it sounds like Jeremy Clarkson might be oversimplifying a tad. Nobody in the UK (or in England at least, i'm not as familiar with devolved policy) gets paid for full rewilding (in the sense of taking land completely out of production and leaving it, a philosophy most famously espoused in England by the Knepp estate). English agri-environment policy expects some kind of active management of the land taken out of production. There are a range of options farmers can choose which they have to discuss and agree based on the land type and context with a specialist adviser. For bees this might be cultivating a plot of plant species chosen for pollen and nectar, for example. The payment is calculated on a model based on "income foregone plus costs" so in theory should be worth exactly the same as an equivalent crop on that patch of land (although in practice this obviously varies a bit depending on how marginal the land is and fluctuations in the market). Generally the amount of admin and time required, and the limited funds available, means that nobody is making very much money off this. The much more broken UK subsidy is the Basic Payment System - a leftover from the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Here farmers are paid a flat rate per hectare for any land used for agriculture - just cash handed over with no incentive to either improve productivity or manage for the environment. For obvious reasons this disproportionately benefits massive landowners. This is thankfully currently being phased out and the funds shifted towards the agri-environment model, which has its problems but at least delivers something.
- rolleiflex 5y ago
  Thank you for more context. To Clarkson’s credit, they did show the improvements being made to the ‘wilded’ areas, like making it more hospitable for bees and owls, however, likely because of TV interest reasons they never mentioned why they were doing them, and I think most people assumed because ‘it makes a good episode’. So they certainly did not leave unfarmed areas just lie as they are, they did several episodes worth of work to make them better for wildlife.

acatnamedjoe 5y ago

Adding some slight nuance to this as it sounds like Jeremy Clarkson might be oversimplifying a tad. Nobody in the UK (or in England at least, i'm not as familiar with devolved policy) gets paid for full rewilding (in the sense of taking land completely out of production and leaving it, a philosophy most famously espoused in England by the Knepp estate). English agri-environment policy expects some kind of active management of the land taken out of production. There are a range of options farmers can choose which they have to discuss and agree based on the land type and context with a specialist adviser. For bees this might be cultivating a plot of plant species chosen for pollen and nectar, for example. The payment is calculated on a model based on "income foregone plus costs" so in theory should be worth exactly the same as an equivalent crop on that patch of land (although in practice this obviously varies a bit depending on how marginal the land is and fluctuations in the market). Generally the amount of admin and time required, and the limited funds available, means that nobody is making very much money off this. The much more broken UK subsidy is the Basic Payment System - a leftover from the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Here farmers are paid a flat rate per hectare for any land used for agriculture - just cash handed over with no incentive to either improve productivity or manage for the environment. For obvious reasons this disproportionately benefits massive landowners. This is thankfully currently being phased out and the funds shifted towards the agri-environment model, which has its problems but at least delivers something.

rolleiflex 5y ago
Thank you for more context. To Clarkson’s credit, they did show the improvements being made to the ‘wilded’ areas, like making it more hospitable for bees and owls, however, likely because of TV interest reasons they never mentioned why they were doing them, and I think most people assumed because ‘it makes a good episode’. So they certainly did not leave unfarmed areas just lie as they are, they did several episodes worth of work to make them better for wildlife.