Speeches by Eagle.

“If there are things that you want to draw to my attention that would make it easier for farmers who access technology in that way to interact with our grants, I am more than happy to hear what you have to say about it.”

“I do think, by the way, that there is an issue if we are talking about access to healthy food, particularly in very obvious areas of food deserts and deprivation. There is a real issue that we all have to think about around the positive correlation between poverty and obesity, which has come about as a result of the wa…”

“This comes across my desk all the time whenever there is a trade deal in the offing.”

“And regulating for pollution and all the externalities that can occur. I know that consumers in the UK value high-welfare animals. We have to make sure that labelling is appropriate and correct. As a Department, we have not taken a view on how people should farm, so long as they farm within the animal welfare and pollu…”

“Yes.”

“As I said earlier, the Government have not taken a view on what size farms should be or how production should be organised, except regulating for animal welfare on such farms—”

“Okay.”

“If you are asking me whether we will do that here, the answer is no. We have our environmental improvement legal requirements. We have moved to a system where we are paying for public goods and the provision of improvements in soil and nature, as well as farming more sustainably. If we were to switch back that would be…”

“Can you repeat your question? Sorry, I was still raising my eyes to the ceiling at your political comment and I forgot to concentrate on the actual question. Perhaps you could try me again.”

“I absolutely hear you, but I am not going to comment on a current planning issue.”

“You have made your point about that particular local issue very strongly.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I am not trying to say that we should put solar on grouse moors. I am trying to establish the size of the issue. I think that it goes to 0.4% by 2030, which is still about half as much as we use for golf courses at the moment.”

“It is a question of scale. I do not know the details of the application in your constituency and I certainly would not want to comment on things that are live going through planning. At the moment, 0.1% of land in England is under use for solar. Half of that is also used for food production, usually by sheep grazing at…”

“Given what you have just read out, it sounds like there is a great deal of chance to improve them. They also are not surprising because of the huge uncertainties and change that the farming sector—and by that I mean the wider agricultural sector—has been through in the last few years. It continues to face some degrees …”

“I was up at Harper Adams the other day looking at what it is doing in terms of education and skills training. There is some very impressive work going on in our agricultural colleges. There are some gaps with onward skills training for people who are out there farming. With the march of agritech and some of the new tec…”

“One has to produce food. One also has to have somewhere to live. Planning authorities are all about deciding how to do that. The land use framework, when it is published, will be a tool for deciding how those balances need to be struck. They have always been struck, over the years, as we have developed as an economy. T…”

“Yes, of course, but we have to get our own house in order before we can lecture other people about it. You say we import feed. We do, but a lot of our arable land is taken up growing feed for the animals that we raise in this country. I think that when I last looked, staggeringly, it was 70%.”

“I would like them to improve.”

“If you look at the structure of farms by the land that they own and the size of the companies that run them, there are very large farms at the top that produce a far larger percentage of our food than the land percentage that they are farming. There is then a very long tail of family farming businesses as well. We have…”