Geoff Sansome, a Worcestershire farmer, said NE was working actively with Defra to propose ways how farmers delivering the highest level of environmental outcomes on SSSI can be better rewarded
Recently I have been disappointed to see various reports on Natural England's (NE) so-called ‘anti-farming' culture.
As both head of agriculture for NE and a partner in our family farm in Worcestershire, farming is my life blood.
My family have farmed in the county for over 200 years, and I have farmed our land for the last 20 years of those.
Farming is the backbone of our beautiful countryside, putting food on our plates and shaping the landscapes we see around us today.
This is not just my view - it is a view shared by my colleagues across NE.
I cannot stress enough the importance the entire organisation places on engaging and working with farmers to protect and enhance some of our most valuable and treasured landscapes.
Yes, we are the government's statutory advisor on nature conservation; our role is to provide advice on site special scientific interest (SSSI) and its management.
We also have a legal responsibility to ensure management of protected sites is done in a way that leads to ‘favourable condition'.
But that does not mean we are here to dictate to farmers, or to put up barriers to agriculture and food production.
Quite the opposite.
Each year NE receives around 3000 applications for SSSI consents - a consent which allows farming activity on the land.
Of these, fewer than one per cent are refused.
We work together with farmers to find pragmatic ways to agree consents, allowing farming to continue while also protecting the SSSI feature.
Farming and nature cannot be seen at polar ends of the spectrum.
Just as farmers rely on the land for productive agriculture, our land relies on farmers.
Many of the SSSI on farmland have been shaped and created by around 6000 years of farming in this country.
Take Dartmoor, the topic of much of the debate in recent weeks.
A favourable condition on Dartmoor means a mosaic of habitats containing gorse, heather, bogs and other upland plants which support species such as curlew and golden plover once common across the South West uplands, while also protecting peat and preventing carbon being released into the atmosphere.
Farmers have a vital role to play in meeting this favourable condition.
They know better than anyone that these special habitats rely on grazing to maintain the mixture of plant species needed, but too much grazing at the wrong time of year can lead to a domination of grasses and the loss of the structure that is needed for wildlife to flourish.
Over the last six months, our teams have been out walking the moors with ecologists, farmers, conservation organisations and landowners, discussing pressures, problems and solutions.
What is abundantly clear from these conversations is that, together, we have the same long-term vision for the moor - and a joint determination to get there.
The independent review into the management of protected sites of Dartmoor is now underway, with the expert panel and terms of reference announced just this week.
By reviewing the ecological evidence base and current trends, the review will make recommendations on the most effective grazing and management regimes which will deliver sustainable and profitable agricultural production.
We want to see this review delivering improvements for SSSIs across Dartmoor.
Alongside this they will look at ensuring public access and cultural and natural heritage, which are also hugely important in how we manage these sites.
I look forward to engaging with the outcomes of this review and using the shared evidence base to work with farmers to build a future where nature and farming on Dartmoor can thrive together.
In the meantime, we continue to work with farmers around the country to deliver for both agriculture and the environment.
The farmers and landowners we work with know these special landscapes like the back of their hands, and more often than not are at the forefront of wanting to protect them.
Our view is that those farmers who are custodians of SSSI should be properly rewarded and we want to support all those who wish to apply for agri-environment schemes, both existing schemes but also new opportunities arising from Defra's new Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMs).
We are working actively with Defra to propose ways how farmers delivering the highest level of environmental outcomes on SSSI can be better rewarded.
We currently have more than 500 farm advisers working with over 30,000 farmers to help support this.
They work with farm businesses to help them enter environment schemes, resolve water catchments issues, or manage habitats on their farms.
Many of our advisers are farmers themselves or come from a farming background and have first-hand knowledge of the landscapes and communities in which they work.
The work we do around managing these sites is informed by evidence and science and helps bring significant wider benefits for farmers, be it providing habitats for the pollinators which are essential for their crops or restoring wetlands which can store water for irrigation or help reduce the impact of flooding.
As we look to the future, it is imperative we bring together farming and nature helping us meet our commitment to restore 75 per cent of our SSSI to favourable condition by 2042.
It is these SSSI which will sit at the heart of a much wider network for nature recovery, essential for future profitable and sustainable farming systems.
