Tag Archives: Conservation Farming

Book Review

Shaping the Wild, by David Elias

Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a
Welsh Hill Farm, by David Elias.
Calon, 2023.
ISBN 978-1-9152-7934-7.

There are plenty of nature-on-farms books written by anxious conservationists, telling how everything is falling to bits (and it’s the farmers’ fault). There are not a few written by nature-loving farmers, telling how farmers are the people closest to the land and the nature on it.

There are rather fewer written by lifelong conservationists, who’ve chosen to visit and study one farm for a period of years, and try to understand the constraints on the farmer, the shifting tides of policy, and the balance that will actually benefit wildlife. In fact, I rather suspect this is the first one.

Craig-y-tân is a hill farm in the Eryri (Snowdonia) national park. There are some tiny stone-walled fields near the farmhouse; some rough pasture down by the river, the Afon Lliw; some old-fashioned broadleaved woodland on the hillslope, up to the mountain wall; an area as big as all of the above of “steep ffridd”, bouldery mountainside; and then a large area of upland blanket bog. The neighbouring areas include another isolated house, two footbridges, a ruined farm, a waterfall, and a chunk of 20th century conifer plantation.

It is difficult to make money on a hill farm. Traditional life was close to subsistence. Lambs were lost to foxes; hay was hard to make in wet Welsh mountain summers; peat was cut by hand. Governments have offered money to “improve” the land by draining or reseeding. Constant changes of farming policy have meant that one action was required to get a grant: then another. The blanket bog was filled with drainage ditches; now there are grants to stop up the drains and restore the peat, which stores large amounts of carbon: as long as it stays wet.

Conservationists have scratched their heads about how to manage wildlife on hill farms. If you take the sheep off the land, birch and willow trees spring up, their shoots un-nibbled, and the attractive rough grass, with its flowers and birds and insects, disappears into forest. If you add sheep, the farm may make more money but the flowers are grazed down to nothing and you again lose much of the wildlife. Just a little bit of conservation grazing, then? Elias notes the doubtful looks he gets when he hums and hahs in answer to a plain farming question, what to do. Possibly the farmer is doing really rather well, given all the trade-offs.

As for trees, governments in the 20th century encouraged economic forestry, meaning plantations of Sitka spruce, a non-native tree. This can all the same be good for wildlife, as young conifers compete with sallow, birch, rowan, and bramble, with homes for reed buntings, tree pipits, whitethroats and other warblers, along with butterflies and dragonflies. But as the spruces get tall and dark, all of that disappears, and there is a bare forest floor, shaded by a dense canopy, which supports a few specialist birds like siskins and crossbills. When the trees are big enough, they are harvested all at once with an enormous “sexy-looking Finnish machine” that enables one man to cut the trees, strip the trunks, slice them to length, and stack them for transporting without leaving the machine’s cab.

If you could have the conifers in small blocks of different ages (more like a traditional coppice woodland), then you would get a mosaic effect, with much more wildlife; even better, you might mix in some broadleaved trees for the insects and birds they can support. Of course, harvesting then becomes less convenient.

That’s not even to mention climate change. Many of the most-prized species are vanishing as the climate warms. Familiar upland birds like the curlew have all but gone; the farmer’s son doesn’t know them at all. A day spent searching the upland bog for large heath butterflies finds none: apparently there were only 2 sightings in the whole of Wales. Elias admits that in 50 years as a naturalist and conservationist, he has seen “a quiet draining away” of wildlife from many landscapes.

This is Elias’s first book. I found the first two or three chapters a little repetitive, as he chews over the issues slowly and carefully; a bit of copy-editing would not have gone amiss. But he warms to his work, and the later chapters are more direct, more fluent, if still grappling with the tangled conservation and farming issues.

His familiarity with farming legislation, carefully footnoted, and his evident sympathy for the Welsh hill-farmer make this an informative and distinctive book. Shaping the Wild doesn’t offer easy answers; but it steers clear both of despair (conservation has achieved nothing, hill-farming is doomed) and of facile optimism (the next government policy will fix everything).

The last chapter agrees that the countryside has changed beyond recognition, but insists that many people who are not conservationists enjoy nature, from farmers to mountain bikers. They’re the audience. And the farm? Elias considers whether

Craig-y-tân is an anachronism maintained at considerable public expense, or a beacon of hope and a way forward. It is still a beautiful place and rich in wildlife, especially by current standards; it is also a viable, if subsidised, working farm in the hands of a local Welsh-speaking family committed to their community and way of life. — Ch. 13 In the End

May it long continue.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

I received a review copy of this book.

Conservation

RSPB Central London Local Group: Hope Farm (and Buffet)

Yesterday I went along to the RSBP’s Central London Local Group. They meet in the Scottish church hall behind Harrods in Knightsbridge: on the short walk from the tube I passed some amazingly expensive-looking people, associated with a lot of taxis and a green-coated commissionaire. Inside, I nibbled a biscuit and was offered a raffle ticket.

The group’s AGM was billed to last 30 minutes: it did, and was presented efficiently and interestingly by the members of the organizing committee. They regularly run 10 coach trips each year to out-of-town reserves as far away as Lymington and Slimbridge.  They hold a similar number of indoor meetings, with at least one scientific talk, a non-birding talk, one on a specific bird, and some on good birding places in Britain or overseas. Audiences are increasing; the group is more than breaking even, and makes an annual donation to RSPB projects.

The main talk was by Ian Dillon who manages the RSPB’s Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire. It’s not exactly a nature reserve: it’s a working farm, bought after a successful fundraising campaign in 1999, and run “for Food, Profit and Wildlife”. Dillon used to be warden of a nature reserve up in Orkney caring for Corncrakes, once a familiar farmland bird (I actually remember our music master at school berating the congregation during a singing practice for sounding like Corncrakes (they go Crek, Crek not terribly musically), which tells you how long ago it was) but now almost extinct except in the Outer Hebrides where the shy birds don’t have to try to outrun giant modern tractors that can harvest a field at 25mph.

Dillon gave a practised and lively talk about Hope Farm, covering the 90% decline in some farmland birds since 1970 (Grey Partridge, Corn Bunting, Turtle Dove among them) as farmers have, from their point of view, improved their farming. They grow twice as much wheat per hectare, up to around 8 tons. They have achieved this through intensification, using pesticides, fertilisers, mechanisation and drainage. The result is clean, healthy crops, free of weeds, pests, and diseases: but also largely free of wildlife. Specific issues for birds are the increase in winter wheat and barley, meaning there is no food-rich stubble for them to feed on in the winter, and the 1960s policy of grubbing out hedges to increase field size and hence efficiency, removing nesting sites, insects, and roosts. The speed of modern farm machinery is also fatal to wildlife such as Grey Partridges and hedgehogs. The overall effect is an average 50% decline in farmland birds since 1970; it has not quite run to completion, with numbers continuing to decline slowly in what is in the more arable parts of Britain such as East Anglia effectively a sterile countryside adapted to industrial food production.

Hope Farm runs a conventional wheat-oilseed rape – wheat – beans/peas rotation. With the EU farm subsidy, and farmed by an efficient large contractor – each big machine only visits the farm for a few days per year: it would be silly for Hope Farm to buy its own – the farm makes a profit and achieves good yields, so in theory farmers should be happy to listen to what the farm has to say about its practices, however much of a turn-off they find the name ‘RSPB’.

For as well as farming, Hope Farm aims to increase wildlife, at least its farmland birds. It has been successful so far: since 2000 the number of Skylark territories has increased fourfold, while Yellowhammers have recovered to more than their 1960s levels – luckily an early BTO survey covered the farm. Wintering bird numbers are well up, too – 200 Yellowhammers, 37 Grey Partridges, 172 Skylarks, exceeding expectations. This has been achieved with two main changes: some small inconvenient-to-plough areas have been sown with mixed crop seeds so different birds each get winter food; and five metre square patches, dotted around the arable fields, have been left bare, enabling Skylarks to feed in summertime. Curiously the Skylarks actually continue to nest in the dense crops (of wheat, etc), but once these become tall they find it hard to land there, so without bare patches they tend to nest close to the ‘tramlines’ made by the tractor when spraying. The nests don’t get run over, nor are the birds destroyed by harvesting (they’ve flown by then), but nesting near the tramlines so they can readily take off and land makes them vulnerable to passing predators – foxes, badgers, hedgehogs – all of which use the tramlines. Very careful survey work, with remote cameras, proved that this was the problem. So the lark patches help, but in rather an indirect and surprising way.

Hope Farm has to date been less successful at persuading farmers to follow suit. The RSPB set out confident that with solid evidence of effectiveness and profit, the world would do what they said. Ah, they reckoned without the slow, cautious, individualistic, calculating ways of the farmer. After all, why do anything that doesn’t pay? One answer is that it does: you qualify for an agro-environment scheme, which increases your subsidy. Another is, that trying to farm those small awkward corners doesn’t pay, either: you spend more time and money trying to work those bits of land, which slope, or are shaded, or have poor drainage, or are more susceptible to disease, and the effort, diesel, seed, pesticides and fertiliser you use are not justified by the small extra returns. This is for the farmer a practical matter; for us and the RSPB and our children, a matter of whether there will be wildlife in farmland, or not.

The evening ended with a delicious finger buffet and a glass of Cava. The group is active, enthusiastic, and runs a varied programme. I shall go along. Why don’t you?