An apple a day

One of the consequences of the reduction in casual labour on farms is that many of the smaller jobs and, in particular, the manual jobs don't get done. This is partly the result of the intensification of agriculture and the need to justify all labour costs in a manner that satisfies the adviser, the accountant and the bank manager, but it is also the result of the reluctance of many of those who work on farms to do the manual jobs such as cleaning out the drain that cannot be reached by the swing shovel. Part of the excitement for young employees is the opportunity to drive 'boys toys' which they do largely pretty efficiently, if too fast, on country lanes. It is hard enough to sell the idea of an agricultural career to schoolchildren. It won't be made easier by telling them that they will be cleaning out the pig sheds by hand.
One of the jobs that used to be done on a mixed Devon farm was pruning the apple trees in the orchards. In recent years it isn't only this job that hasn't been done, it is even the picking or collecting of the apples themselves that has been ignored as the apples fall and the ground around the trees seethes in a wasp frenzy. Collecting apples has either not proved profitable enough or, because picking in orchards is increasingly mechanised, the appropriate machinery has not been available at the right price for the small scale producer to make it worth their while.

One of few blossoms this year

Last year, unable to bear the waste, I borrowed some big bags that my neighbour uses to collect his apples. He is a man in his 70s, used to hard work and to making the most of his resources and not afraid of a bit of hard work himself. He takes his apples in by the trailer load and is fortunate to have an outlet locally where he sells them by the tonne.
 I filled the bags and took them to our local town where we didn't just sell the apples, we had some of them them (the cider apples!) made into cider, others into fruit juice and some went into the freezer.The cider's good and we will be drinking it at my son's wedding in a few weeks time.
This year however the trees are bare. Very few of them, in the atrocious weather conditions, have produced fruit at all and those apples that have appeared look more like green maltesers they are so small.

Cider orchard in winter

One or two trees are doing well however.This is the advantage of having an orchard with a mixture of varieties to deal with the vicissitudes of the seasons; of temperature, rainfall, flowering and pollination. Modern commercial growers, faced with the stringent demands of the supermarkets and their buying public who they don't bother to educate about varieties or blemishes and needing to mechanise and standardise don't have this option. A rise in price won't help them if they don't have any and in a world market there are plenty that will have them. Buy British will sound a bit hollow.
Our orchards are not going to be much of a commercial asset this year but they are an environmental oasis. Whether it is lichen, butterflies, birds, flowers or bees; they play an important role in this special part of Devon

It isn't easy to be a wildlife friendly farmer- guest blog

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 20^th 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!

 This blog was posted on Mark Avery's blog at his kind invitation

Drought-Can we learn from the past?

Throughout the 15th and 16th Centuries my family were constantly in disputes about water. Sheep were an important source of wealth and merchants grew rich on the wool trade in neighbouring towns such as Tiverton and Exeter. Sheep need drinking water though. Not as much as cattle certainly but nevertheless spring fed streams were vital at a time before the widespread availability of iron pipes and metal water troughs. So ownership of the water rights and control of the streams was of crucial importance to those who farmed the animals and wanted to share in this wealth.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries the plentiful availability of labour enabled the construction of 'catch meadows' and their associated irrigation systems which followed the contours of our Devon valleys. Carrying either water or a combination of water and cattle dung from spring sources or collecting points, they helped crops grow with a mixture of irrigation and fertilisation. Even in a year of average rainfall, irrigation will improve grass growth so judicious release of water into these systems paid dividends.
I have seen intricate and clever systems of water transfer in other parts of the world. The paddy fields of China and the Far East and the long and delicate channels flowing down the rocky valley sides in what were then the Trucial States adjoining the Gulf are but two examples. In areas of water shortage mankind has become adept at water transfer. In a country where we have been used to plenty however such as the UK we have not generally put a high enough value on the water to justify the infrastructure cost of transfer. The concepts of pipelines or tankers to transfer water from north and west to south and east in this country fall down when the financial calculations are done.
There are only two things that can be done to alleviate the situation; reducing demand or increasing supply and it is the matching of these two that holds the key. All three-supply,demand and balancing-require investment if you assume, as I do, that climatic patterns are shifting bringing us greater extremes and variations.

Increasing supply must start with the provision of more storage reservoirs to capture such rainfall as there is and to supplement aquifers. Well designed, these can benefit businesses, perhaps communities too and certainly wildlife as can any modern catch meadows or leats that flow from them( the Devon Wildlife Trust have tried to restore some)- but the construction of the reservoirs is often mired in red tape and they are expensive; fiscal incentives would help. Reducing demand in domestic situations is about behaviour change; in business situations it is about research and development into affordable alternatives. In farming, reducing the demand for food will hardly help us to achieve food security in a hungry world so this might mean drought resistant varieties. This re-opens the GM debate. Finally balancing these two requires anticipating rainfall and matching it with temperature and crop and animal requirements. This is about accurate forecasting which, once again, will need funding.
In Devon we once had catch meadows. Now we have the Met Office in Exeter. We need to play a full part in the debate.

More food, more environment

The challenge that the farming industry has been set is how to produce more food for a growing population without damaging an already fragile environment.
Owners of land have a choice as to what they do with that land. If they want a return on that asset as many do, then they will want to see it put to an economic use. Inadvertant changes in taxation policy could put even more pressure on the owner to seek an economic return.
The return could be either in the form of profit to a farmer or rent payable to the owner. Both of these have historically favoured maximising the returns from agriculture.
If the owner is to put the land to an alternative use; an environmental rather then a economic use for example, then he/she will have to either obtain some value from that environmental use or do so for some altruistic reason.
Some, like those with a very long term perspective, might see the importance of maintaining biodiversity for its own sake. Others might gain some economic benefit from environmental enhancement such as from a tourist enterprise. Normally however it involves sacrificing profit and production even alongside environmental stewardship schemes. For environmental protection and enhancement to have a chance against intensive agriculture then some value needs to be placed on other activities such as water management, carbon sequestration or increasing skylark breeding numbers for example.
Tenant farmers are particularly vulnerable to the pressure to make every acre of land pay. This is partly because they have to pay rent on almost every acre and partly because they do not share in the benefit of any uplift in value that may flow from an improvement in the biodiversity of the holding.
We might see a net increase in environmental quality on let land if the landlords were prepared to make it a condition of letting the land. To do so however they would probably have to be prepared to take a reduction in monetary return. Would they do so? Perhaps if they were wealthy enough, had a long horizon or had a sense of, or the need to demonstrate, corporate responsibility.
The Government Environment White Paper introduced the concept of Natural Capital . Perhaps we will soon see the Chancellor reporting on this in his annual budget. Until the bank manager recognises natural capital however, owner occupier farmers, tenants and landlords will struggle to justify environmental investment over investment in increasing food production.