Experiencing wildlife is one of the privileges of living in
the countryside. Hearing it, seeing it and trying to understand it continues to
delight and challenge me. Will the blue tits successfully use the house martins’
nest? Is it rabbit, squirrel or deer that has been removing the bark from that
tree? You become only too aware that the interaction between species is an ever
changing and delicate one. I suppose that is what ecosystems are.
We are very lucky. Our family have lived in the same part of
Devon for many centuries. This gives me a feeling of responsibility for our
land, for our buildings and for the community in which we live. The interaction
between these different components gives us an ecosystem of our own.
For many years our family/land ecosystem has evolved slowly.
We have navigated our way through diseases (Black Death); wars (including the
Civil War) and economic turmoil (The Great Depression). As our family ecosystem
has evolved so we have influenced wildlife and landscape in this little part of
the country. Land use change may have resulted from personal interest (planting
trees, particularly specimen trees) but more often from the economics of
farming. We grew oats to feed working horses until the early 20th
century; flat pole cabbages, swedes and turnips either for human consumption or
for livestock. Animals also grazed the grass that was fed by irrigation
channels (‘catch meadows’) dug into the slopes.
The evolution of the wildlife ecosystems and our own was
slow and they were interrelated. Some of our food and medicines came from the
wild. Our community was a rural and farming one.
We have evidence of what life was like in this part of Devon
over the years. I remember it as a boy. There is no doubt that we are seeing
changes. The most obvious ones that I notice are rabbits back in some years to
pre myxomatosis levels but no hares; a hugely increased population of badgers
but very few hedgehogs; a hugely increased population of wood pigeons and
corvids but fewer songbirds and less diversity. There are less insects and
bees. There are fewer wildflowers, orchids, hedgerow plants and no poppies in
the fields. There are more roe deer and a huge number of grey squirrels. There
are no grey partridge. I am sad to see these changes as I know are very many
other farmers and landowners. So the natural ecosystems are changing but so too
has our ecosystem.
This last century saw an increase in the rate of change
however. The first ‘popular’ tractor arrived in 1917 (the Fordson); the first
commercial chainsaws appeared in the 1930s and the first commercially available
pesticides and herbicides arrived around 1950. This coupled with a national
policy to increase production led to the well documented changes that have led
to changes in wildlife.
A vital part of our own ecosystem is money. We have a large
overdraft to service, built up in the long period until recently when farming
produced few profits. So repaying loans has to be done alongside competing demands
in our ecosystem such as maintaining listed buildings at huge cost. Farming in
an environmentally friendly way is a challenge. Stewardship schemes help but they
are less well funded than they were and they don’t cover everything these days.
I have spent a lot of money this last year on laying hedges, clearing scrub etc
in areas not covered by the schemes. I will be providing public access next
year that I am not compelled to do but will improve visitors enjoyment on an
Iron Age hill fort. It will cost me money and bring me in no return at all and
I will have to consider additional issues like health and safety as a
consequence.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that the modern
farmer uses whatever technology is available to him to improve financial
performance; plants winter crops not spring crops and generally make his farm
more efficient. He doesn’t want to see grain spilled on the ground at harvest
even if sparrows do. He doesn’t have the time to measure optimum sward height
or to manage small groups of cattle in tiny fields. He already has much more
paperwork so he doesn’t welcome more. If he leaves skylark plots it looks as
though his seed drill was blocked.
It isn’t that he is necessarily hostile to nature. Indeed he
probably regrets the changes as much as anyone. It is just that he needs to
make his living and he is wired to maximise production. He sees his role as
feeding the population of this country and the world. He wishes he could do
both.
An increasing number of farmers are however trying to
produce food and environmental benefit together and, at long last, some serious
attempts are being made to quantify this environmental benefit and to find ways
of reflecting this in returns. The return of profitability to UK agriculture
will certainly help but farming is an increasingly complex business and it
would help if environmental guidance was clear, unambiguous and easy to
implement. My worry is that the responses on the ground on individual farms will
be too piecemeal and too small scale to reverse the declines in biodiversity
that we have already seen.
One of the difficulties is the fact that the debate is often
portrayed as production versus conservation and that this debate is conducted
in the media often by sound bite. This blog is no stranger to the need to
stimulate interest by courting controversy! There is a danger that the retreat
into silos may happen politically too with the newly formed LEPs (local
enterprise partnerships) not speaking to the soon to be formed LNPs (local nature
partnerships) and leaving it to Government (DEFRA and BIS) to adjudicate. It
will be interesting to see if the newly formed Rural and Farming Network
reporting to DEFRA can help. I chair the South West Network in a part of the
world where farming, environmental and community interests have worked well
together and where our group was specifically designed to include
representatives from each sector. I will let you know how we get on!
