The NFU has called on the Government to redouble its efforts to help farms still coping with the deluge of water from Storm Desmond now the media spotlight has moved on.
 
To highlight the scale of the problem, the union has made a video focusing on one of the worst hit farms to suffer every type of damage possible from the sheer force of the flood on 5 December.
 
NFU’s director of policy, Andrew Clark, said the organisation is still lobbying hard to get aid to flood stricken farmers in the north, who are now facing an immensely difficult clean-up operation. Though the government has defended its record on flood preparedness and said response times were quicker when floods hit in December than in previous years, Labour ministers have claimed that flood victims have only received a fraction of the funding promised in the wake of flooding in Somerset, and have accused the Tories of offering “Vague promises and random numbers that are forgotten by spring.”
 
On Tuesday, NFU’s Mr Clark said, “The NFU welcomes a lot of the pragmatic decisions government agencies such as the Environment Agency and the RPA have taken to allow farmers to focus on the flood recovery operation. However, as part of a wider package of measures, the NFU is also asking for BPS part-payments to address cash flow issues, and lenient inspections by the RPA.
 
“We would also like to see the Government providing more resilient ways of managing flood risks that combine locally tailored solutions with an approach that can cope with more frequent and volatile weather. And we would also welcome an extension of the Farming Recovery Fund to support the recovery effort, which on some farms is well beyond the cost envisaged by the current Fund rules.”
 
At Low Bridge End Farm in Keswick, Cumbria, flood waters obliterated bridges, fences and dry stone walls and submerged the 50 acre farm’s lowlands. All of its fields were eroded and some have been left buried under tonnes of gravel. Over 20 chickens were lost in the flood and just three of the farm’s 20 geese survived.

Sarah Chaplin-Brice, whose family has been on the farm for over a century, is calling on the Government to produce a more co-ordinated response to flood victims in the future.
 
She said, “It’s just horrendous; it’s a very disheartening sight to see basically what we’ve worked for all our lives just destroyed. Every single one of our fields was flooded by Storm Desmond. We’re looking at so much debris and damage we really don’t know where to begin with the clean-up. We’re just taking each day as it comes at the moment, it’s just really hard.”
 
The NFU’s video on Low Bridge End Farm can be watched here: