6 The Farmed Environment

Between the coast and the mountain tops most British wildlife depends in some way on farming. Livestock grazing maintains grassland and heath, and arable farming creates an open, desert-like environment suitable for annual flowers that produce vast amounts of seed. One of the reasons why farming within living memory supported so much wildlife was that farming was itself such a varied activity. There was crofting – mixed smallholdings, mainly in western Scotland, and commoning – communal use of land by people with property rights. There were specialist ‘habitat’ farmers – fenmen, shepherds and open-range herdsmen – part-time Cornish farmers who grew bulbs and violets, and big estates that could afford to devote much of the land to country sports. Poor land was often left fallow for a season or two. Most farmers grew their own hay to feed the horses. And most fertiliser came from a horse, the river or the seashore; everything was farmed organically. The variety of farming contributed to Britain’s natural variety of habitat. Some habitats for wildlife were created by farmers: meadows, hedges, arable, most ponds, some copses. It is worth emphasising, though, that others were not – no one planted the heather or the wild grass, nor dumped sand and mud around the coast, nor were the limestone pavements created by a supremely talented rock-gardener, though they may look like it (Plate 5).

The history of farming is no more serene and stable than any other industry. There have been violent lurches from corn to grass and back again, and the remembered landscape of the 1930s, with its boundless acres of ‘permanent pasture’, was in fact the product of empire: cheap imports and consequent lack of investment. The period between 1940 and about 1985, however, saw unprecedented changes in farming. It became reliant on technology and factory methods that boosted efficiency and, for a while, farm incomes, at the expense of the environment. It was foolish for farmers to pretend during this period that the countryside was safe with them. It was not, everybody knew it was not, and we, and they, are living with the consequences now. Here, as elsewhere in this book, we are chiefly concerned with the effect on wildlife of this agricultural boom-time, and also of the various subsequent schemes to reduce surpluses and create a more attractive countryside.

The bad old days

Agricultural policy between the 1940s and the 1980s aimed at increasing food production. The golden goal, which, until the surpluses started to pile up, was rarely questioned, was to make sure home-grown food was cheap and plentiful, and farmers prosperous. A vast increase in production was made possible by the postwar revolution in agricultural technology. Crop breeding produced new varieties of barley and wheat with ultra-high yields sustained by heavy dosages of chemical fertiliser and pesticides. Government grants paid for underdrains and the removal of hedges. On suitable land, the old mixed farms of prewar Britain turned into generally bigger arable units, with huge investments in machinery and grain silos. The big tractors with their spray booms, and the even bigger combine harvesters, required big fields; by 1980 the ideal wheat field was about 20 hectares, preferably in a perfect rectangle. Some fields were even larger: ‘square miles of clods’, as Jeremy Purseglove described them (Purseglove 1988). In the end, science and technology overtook human needs. By 1984, Britain’s arable farmers produced 26 million tonnes of cereals, which was 10 million tonnes more than we could eat, and yet was unsaleable on world markets without an uneconomic price subsidy (that is, a bribe paid by taxes). Of course, this level of production came at a cost. That year, support to agriculture was around £5,000 million (Blunden & Turner 1985), so our food was not really as cheap as it seemed to be. The price we paid in environmental terms was even greater. Roughly half of the hedgerows of Britain – some 160,000 kilometres – were ripped out between 1950 and 1995, creating open prairies in place of the traditional landscape of small fields and copses. Less visibly our water and soil became awash with nitrates from farm fertilisers, causing a wholesale eutrophication of the environment: murky water and lower natural diversity.

The flood plain of the River Kennet near Ramsbury in Wiltshire. It looks pleasant enough, but it represents a farming system in ruins. The sluice gates that maintained a network of drains that ‘drowned’ the fields in winter no longer function. Most of the nearby downland was ploughed in the 1950s and is now in set-aside. The scraps that remain are probably too small to prevent gradual loss of biodiversity. The woods overlooking the valley are no longer coppiced for hazel springs and have become too shady to support many wild flowers and flying insects. The breed that supported all three habitats – the Wiltshire sheep – is extinct.

No room for wildlife: farming in the Lincolnshire wolds. (Natural Image/ Bob Gibbons)

In dairy farming areas, more hedges were retained, but most of the meadows inside them were reseeded. The dairy farmer was encouraged to get rid of traditional breeds and invest in cows that yielded more milk and adapted better to modern farming methods. To increase his stocking density he replaced the old, ill-drained flowery meads with shiny green crops of rye-grass, maintained by generous doses of factory-produced fertiliser. His hay fields were replaced by grass silage, also fertilised to replace the flowers with more grass and allow more than one crop to be taken. Mechanised cutting in May instead of July evicted the birds and prevented the remaining flowers from ripening seed. To avoid parasites, the cattle were stuffed with antibiotics and other drugs so that their dung became effectively toxic, thus removing another wildlife habitat. Meanwhile, inflated on their diet of rye-grass and nitrogen, the cows innocently blew holes in the ozone layer. Graham Harvey cited poor Cheshire as the ultimate dairy farm nightmare, stinking of silage and cowpats, ‘a landscape created by the chemical giant ICI’, the sound of larks replaced by that of the ‘fertiliser spreader applying more nitrogen to the thick, lifeless rye-grass sward’ (Harvey 1997).

The rewards for growing cereals under high guaranteed prices encouraged farmers to drain their land. As the drainage of the Fens had shown, even ill-drained ‘levels’ could be turned into fertile, profitable plains once the water had been drawn off by deepening the drains and installing powerful pumps. Drainage is expensive, but the state foots most of the bill. Decisions to drain land were taken by unaccountable local committees, chaired by a MAFF nominee and generally dominated by farmers. In some districts the main drains are the responsibility of Internal Drainage Boards, almost invariably chaired by some big, progressive farmer. At the high tide of the arable farming boom between 1975 and 1985, what Jeremy Purseglove called ‘an army of engineers and machinery controlled by a drainage lobby’ seemed intent on draining lowland Britain dry – dry enough to plant cereals descended from the wild grasses of semi-deserts. The results could be seen on levels and river systems throughout England, from the north Kent marshes to the Somerset Levels, from the Sussex Ouse to the Solway, as one by one former grazing marshes and other semi-natural habitats went under the plough. During my brief period as the NCC’s local officer for Oxfordshire, the Thames Water Authority proposed a £1.6 million drainage scheme to lower the river Cherwell, improve the outfall of its tributary, the Ray, and drain what was left of Otmoor, that erstwhile marshy wilderness in the heart of the county (we had only recently fought off the transport department’s proposal to drive the M40 through it). What saved the Cherwell was influential, articulate Oxford, enraged because punters on the river would have had to stand on tiptoe to peer over the engineered river banks. No wonder that conservationists were forever quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous plea for flooded landscapes:

‘What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’

In the uplands, the main problem is overgrazing, which got worse in the 1990s. The EC sheep meat regime provides yet another form of subsidy, headage payments, which are supposed to guarantee the farmer a decent income irrespective of the state of the market. As a result, sheep numbers almost doubled between 1980 and 1995. In order to increase his stockage, the farmer drains and reseeds the hillside, or, if that is not possible, simply overgrazes it. Without some form of subsidy most hill farmers would go out of business, but the environmental price for continued farming has been dull, reseeded hills and grazed-to-the-knuckle fellsides. The ESA system, designed to preserve heather moors and attractive scenery, has had little overall effect, and no wonder. In the Cambrian Mountains, the farmer is paid £22 per acre for conserving heather, but £30 per head for more sheep. He earns more from the sheep. This manifestly non-sustainable use of our uplands is the result of a remote, sectoral system that addresses one interest – agriculture – but, at least until recently, disregards other claims on the land.

The system was a nonstop engine driven by ninnies and fuelled by money. A generous system of grants, subsidies and tax allowances enabled farmers to invest in land improvement and machinery that enabled them to sell more food at guaranteed prices. The system favoured those who ran their holdings efficiently as a business. Agricultural colleges taught young farmers how to work the system to squeeze ever-greater yields from their land. The agrochemical giant, ICI, set up a special department for lobbying MPs and civil servants. At the hub of the system in Whitehall were the cosy meetings between the minister and the National Farmers’ Union, the free lunches between lobbyists and MPs. As John Sheail noted, the alliance of interests was so strong that conservation and recreational interests had the greatest difficulty in penetrating it, let alone influencing policy (Sheail 1998). The architects of postwar land-use policy, such as John Dower and Lord Justice Scott, had taken for granted the ‘natural affinity’ between farming and the protection of wild places. Technology and self-interest swept all that away, and the sheer complexity of the agricultural system created its own inertia: ‘the pea brain of the dinosaur leading the industry to its own destruction’, as Peter Melchett rather unkindly described it in 1980.

Government farming policy – the nearest thing we have to a national land-use strategy – is made up of the interplay of White Papers and the Common Agricultural Policy. Ever since the Agriculture Act of 1947, government has guaranteed prices for farm produce. Britain’s entry into the EEC in 1973 did not change overall policy, but only reinforced it. Probably more wildlife sites went under the plough between 1940-73 than afterwards, but there was then no monitoring process to put the losses on record. The 1975 White Paper, Food from our own resources, the high tide of agricultural expansion, made few concessions to environmental concerns. Its successor in 1979, Farming and the nation, made some pretence at ‘striking a balance’ between production and amenity. After the test case of Amberley Wild Brooks (see Chapter 10), the protection of wildlife could, in some circumstances, claim precedence, but the onus was on the naturalists to make a convincing case, and the agriculture department would have to be convinced. Production was still the goal, and the crux of the matter was that almost all methods of increasing fertility and improving yields are harmful to wildlife. For the farmer bent wholly on agricultural production, wildlife has virtually nothing to offer. At best it is an irrelevance, at worst an obstacle.

In its 1977 paper, Nature conservation and agriculture, the NCC tried to suggest reasons why wildlife should matter. Some forms of wildlife might yet prove useful, it thought, and therefore it is mere prudence to conserve as many species as possible: ‘This is what conservation is about – maintaining biological diversity and so keeping the options open.’ Moreover, claimed the NCC, ‘conservation and agriculture are interdependent. Agriculture depends upon the conservation of beneficial bacteria, soil invertebrates, pollinators, predators and parasites…the obvious fact [is] that the conservation of the species necessary for farming is essential and provides much of the common ground between agriculture and nature conservation’. Kenneth Mellanby, writing in his New Naturalist volume, Farming and Wildlife (Mellanby 1981), found these arguments unconvincing. The truth is that we do not conserve wildlife because it is valuable, but because we like it. Refusing to admit that feelings have any validity denies our own humanity and threatens to downgrade wildlife to a mere resource. As Richard Mabey saw clearly in The Common Ground, ‘a compassion for and a delight in the natural world are what turn people to act in its defence in the first place’. Just because feelings cannot be quantified it does not make them irrelevant (Mabey 1980).

In the early 1980s, more radical voices analysed the defects of modern farming, including its impacts on wildlife and scenery, and offered their solutions. Marion Shoard (1980) plumped for planning controls and more National Parks. The economist John Bowers wanted to steer tax incentives and subsidies towards more beneficial forms of production. Richard Body, a maverick Conservative MP, argued for a low input-low output system allied to free trade outside the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The right-wing think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, proposed ditching subsidies altogether and leaving farms to sink or swim in a free market (a policy adopted, with notable success, by New Zealand in the 1990s). A few lefties from the farm worker’s union got the Transport and General Workers’ Union to lobby the Labour Party for full-blooded state control of land use through nationalisation. What they all had in common was the conviction that the farming system as it had existed since 1947 offered poor value, and that the urban majority who paid for it had a legitimate say in what was done. As Oliver Rackham put it, with his usual pithiness, we had ‘contrived at the same time to subsidise agriculture much more than any other industry, and to have expensive food and a ravaged countryside’ (Rackham 1986). Nor did the system even benefit farmers as a whole, half of whom had left the industry between 1950 and 1980.

Declining species

For the Prom concerts of 2001, the BBC commissioned a piece from the composer Sally Beamish called Knotgrass Elegy, inspired by a passage in Graham Harvey’s book, The Killing of the Countryside. The work is a parable of the rape of the Earth by the agrochemical industry, as symbolised in the fate of the humble knotgrass weed, Polygonum aviculare. Hardly anyone knew or cared about the knotgrass until its loss was implicated in the decline of a species of economic importance, the grey partridge. The knotgrass happened to be the sole foodplant of a small leaf-beetle, Gastrophysa polygoni, whose larva featured in the diet of partridge chicks. The chicks depend on a sufficient supply of the right kind of insect as a source of protein for growing tissues and bone. So take away the knotgrass and the food chain leading up to the partridge collapses. Less knotgrass must inevitably mean fewer grey partridges. This fact became apparent only because the Game Conservancy had conducted a lot of research on partridges. The paper referred to by Harvey was written in 1982, and since then the grey partridge population has halved. Indeed, it thrives only where cereal growers have compromised by leaving unsprayed headlands or undersowing cereals with grasses. Such efforts are made mainly in places where people are interested in conserving grey partridges in order to shoot them! (Turning this on its head, the Conservancy now advises against shooting grey partridge without habitat conservation measures.) The Game Conservancy’s advocacy of six-metre field headlands saved the grey partridge in such areas, and perhaps the knotgrass too.

The grey partridge survives best where unsprayed headlands are left around crop fields. (Nature Photographers Ltd)

The cornfields of England have lost many flowers prettier and better known than the knotgrass: cornflower, corn marigold, Venus’ looking-glass, corn buttercup, shepherd’s needle, pheasant’s eye, thorow-wax. Their pleasant names convey their one-time familiarity. Thirteen species of ‘arable weeds’ are now categorised as nationally scarce, seventeen are in the Red Data Book, and six have gone altogether, listed as ‘extinct in the wild’ (the distinction is necessary because the odd plant of unknown origin still shows up on disturbed sites). They are not the only farmland plants that are no longer everyday familiars – another missing tribe are the flowers, sedges and grasses of muddy pond margins that once flourished on mixed farms. Yet another group grew on old muck-heaps or in corners of pre-concrete farmyards. ‘Arable weeds’ (‘arable flowers’ is their ‘preferred’ title) used to thrive among crops by means of annual life cycles and persistent seeds that could survive for years in the ground. A few, such as the corncockle, had seeds that resembled grain, and so would be harvested and resown with the seed-corn. Agricultural advances have relegated most of them to the field margins, if not wiped them out altogether. First to go were the distinctive weeds of flax and hemp fields, which disappeared when their host crops ceased to be planted (there are no flax weeds left to colonise today’s subsidised flax crops). Better ways of cleaning grain put paid to the likes of corncockle, but most of our traditional weeds are the victims of chemical herbicides developed in the 1940s and 50s. For example, the ‘hormone weedkiller’ MCPA wiped out the corn buttercup almost overnight. Some weeds, such as mousetail and weasel’s-snout, are also vulnerable to chemical fertiliser. The last stands of cornflower and corn marigold were among root crops such as potatoes and sugar beet. I remember fields golden with marigolds in the early 1970s, in the days when chemists were still searching for an elixir that killed this particular weed without poisoning the crop – but by 1975 they had found it, and then it was goodbye marigolds, and good riddance. (Interesting, though, that many gardeners still plant marigolds among lettuces and other vegetables because they seem to deter insect pests.) Traditional ‘weedy’ fields are now rare, and mainly in areas where there are game crops and game strips for partridges, or where the spray booms miss a bank or corner. The main exception is the poppy, almost impossible to eradicate on chalky soils, thanks to its plentiful and remarkably persistent seeds. Otherwise ‘weeds’ are more likely to be seen as a result of roadworks or pipe-laying operations than farming. For example, a colourful ribbon of poppies, charlock and other weeds flourished for a few years by the recently opened M40 motorway through Oxfordshire. The traditional weeds are no longer an agricultural problem, but chemical farming has bred a new generation of ‘super-weeds’, such as black-grass, cleavers and sterile brome, which thrive on fertiliser and are resistant to herbicides. Unfortunately they do not support the complex food webs of former weeds.

A field they forgot to spray: a crop of poppies and mayweeds. Is the time coming when weeds will be valued more than the crop? (Natural Image/ Bob Gibbons)

Since the 1980s, some of the rarer arable flowers have benefited from conservation schemes (meanwhile, surveys revealed that some were not quite as rare as had been feared). In a few places, rare weeds have even been conserved by abandoning any pretence at profitable farming and, in effect, harvesting the weeds – but this is only really practicable on nature reserves and experimental sites. On the National Trust’s property at Boscregan near Land’s End, unsprayed headlands are left for the attractive purple viper’s-bugloss. In the Breckland, the Suffolk Wildlife Trust has taken on responsibility for certain sandy field margins where rare speedwells and other rare plants grow. Unfortunately, large-scale schemes to reduce overproduction have not made much difference to our weed flora. On short-term set-aside, weeds are tackled as ruthlessly as before, while one widely used option, to sow a strip of grass around a field, actually robs them of their last refuge! Organic farming offers potentially better prospects for weeds, and there are early reports that some rare ones are reappearing where they have been spared by the hoe. Some of the more attractive ones, such as cornflower and corncockle are now a common, if usually temporary, sight where ‘wild flower’ seeds have been sown. Wild flower sowing is a kind of anti-conservation: it replaces what is wild and natural with what we put there by choice and blurs the crucial distinction between habitat management and gardening. In the fields of the future we may even grow cornflowers as a crop. Does it matter if, in the meantime, the native cornflower dies out, or if we can no longer tell the difference? (I only ask.)

Like the weeds they depend on, survival for many farmland birds is currently on a knife edge. In essence, the problem is that they are not finding enough to eat. Like the grey partridge, many birds need a nearby supply of insects to feed their chicks. The same weeds that supported insects also produced masses of seed that fed birds in winter after the land was ploughed. Most agricultural advances mean less food for birds. Autumn sowing means fewer grain-rich stubble fields. Direct drilling does away with replenishment by the plough. Whipping out hedges deprives birds of food, shelter and nesting space. Another necessary factor is variety. Recently the MOD and RSPB carried out the first ever survey of the breeding birds of Salisbury Plain, which is normally out of bounds to the birdwatcher because of military activity. The results were astounding. Here as nowhere else the skies are still full of larks, and birds such as corn bunting, which in other parts is fast going the way of the cornflower, are still common. The reason seems to be not only the great size of the military training area – some 40,000 hectares – but also its variety of farmed habitat. There are big, hedgeless fields of corn, but they are interspersed with hillsides of well-grazed pasture where skylarks nest, knolls of rougher ground inhabited by whinchat and meadow pipit, and scrubby slopes ideal for stonechat and grasshopper warbler. The surveyors estimated that Salisbury Plain holds 48,000 pairs of breeding birds. At 14,600 ‘territories’, the density of skylarks there is higher than almost anywhere else in England and Wales. Thank goodness for tanks and artillery.

More often, birdwatchers will tell you doleful tales of long downland tramps in which they failed to spot a single lapwing and not once heard the familiar trill of a corn bunting. Farm birds monitored by the BTO’s Common Bird Census since 1972 include some of the fastest declining British species. Of Chris Mead’s ‘bottom ten losers’ of the twentieth century, fully half nest and feed mainly on cultivated farmland. Among them is the grey partridge, whose population fell by 78 per cent between 1972 and 1996, along with bullfinch (down 62 per cent on farmland), turtle dove (85 per cent, ditto), corn bunting (74 per cent all habitats) and tree sparrow (76 per cent on farmland). The last-named has become so rare that it is reportedly being targeted by egg thieves. Familiar farm birds such as lapwing, skylark, linnet and even starling are in decline over most of Britain, and even the ubiquitous house sparrow has fallen on hard times (down 64 per cent, all habitats, since the 1970s), although no one knows why. There is, however, a ray of light ahead: Government has selected farm birds as ‘good indicators of wildlife and the health of the wider environment’, and so committed itself to a process that will reverse the decline. (‘We value wildlife for its own sake and because it is an integral part of our surroundings and our quality of life.’.) This is a policy statement to gladden the heart, and we wait with impatience to see how they will achieve it.

The lapwing is one of the losers: everything that could go wrong has gone wrong: field drainage, over-grazing, silage production, autumn sowing, coastal squeeze…Can it hang on in nature reserves until lapwing-friendly agriculture returns? (Natural Image/Bob Gibbons)

It is possible to save declining birds, especially where they nest within limited areas and in a restricted range of habitats. Much effort over the past ten years has gone into halting the declines of three farm birds threatened with extinction: cirl bunting, stone curlew and corncrake. Before the War, the cirl bunting was a fairly widespread songbird in southern England and Wales, with perhaps as many as 10,000 breeding pairs. By the time of the first national survey in 1972, however, its numbers had fallen to just a few hundred pairs, mainly in the Southwest. By 1989 the population had all but collapsed, with just 118 pairs left, mainly in south Devon. Field study by the RSPB revealed that the bunting thrived only on traditional farmland, with thick hedges where it could nest safely, pasture rich in grasshoppers to feed its chicks, and weedy stubble fields to tide the adult birds over winter: a representative farm bird, in fact, but more sensitive than most because Britain lies at the cold edge of its range. The timely ‘extensification’ of agriculture in the 1990s probably saved the cirl bunting. English Nature and the RSPB employed a specialist to sell cirl bunting conservation to the farmers of south Devon as a special project within MAFF’s Countryside Stewardship Scheme, by leaving unsprayed ‘game strips’ and thick, shaggy hedges. The take-up rate was good, and over the past decade Devon’s cirl buntings have quadrupled from 118 to 450 pairs. At this rate the cirl bunting may reach its Biodiversity Action Plan target of 550 pairs within a few years. It will still, however, be confined mainly to south Devon; cirl buntings tend to stay on home ground, and it will be a long time before it is once again a familiar of Wealden farms or Kentish orchards. The cirl bunting had a number of things going for it: agri-environment schemes, money from its sponsors for a crash programme of research, and the fact that the birds nest in an area restricted enough to be targeted by a special scheme. The resources devoted to the cirl bunting had spin-off benefits for other farm wildlife. Birds are glamorous and capture the lion’s share of whatever is going, but they are also sensitive environmental indicators. What benefits the cirl bunting will benefit what it eats, and also some of its wild neighbours.

Cirl bunting, saved by countryside stewardship. (Nature Photographers Ltd)

Another rare bird that has bucked the trend, thanks almost entirely to conservation hand-outs, is the stone curlew. Twenty years ago this shy, mainly nocturnal bird seemed doomed. Stone curlews are birds of the open steppe. Britain’s countryside offers only rather marginal conditions for it, mainly on the sandy heaths of the East Anglian Breckland and on the Wessex Downs, centred on Salisbury Plain. Their distribution closely follows the Chalk. They also nest at a much lower density in spring-sown crop fields, such as carrots and sugar beet. Stone curlews seek out bare, warm, sandy soil with a scatter of flints and stones. They also need a nearby supply of earthworms and insects. These conditions are harder to find than they used to be in the days when the grass was kept short and open by rabbits or range-grazed by cattle and sheep. Demand for low-quality grazing has fallen away, and since the 1950s there are seldom enough rabbits. When the vegetation grows tall and lush, the stone curlews lose interest. As a further handicap they like quiet places, well away from busy footpaths and recreation areas. In arable fields their eggs and chicks get squashed by farm rollers and harrows. It is hardly surprising, really, that the stone curlew is rare in Britain. In the 1960s it was thought that we still had as many as 300 pairs. This was a guess, and it was wrong. When detailed counts were made, in 1993, there were just 145 pairs, compared with between 1,000 and 2,000 before the War.

The RSPB has made great efforts to locate where the birds are nesting and move the eggs before the farmer rolled that part of the field. Research into the finer detail of the bird’s habits revealed the importance of having enough short, open ground for foraging as well as nesting. One could tempt stone curlews to nest on rotovated strips of bare ground within short grassland – a method used with considerable success at Porton Down in Wiltshire, which has held up to 30 pairs. In 2000, assisted by favourable weather, the nationwide population had reached 250 pairs, the best for many years. The stone curlew’s prospects are now rated as excellent – but only if the conservation effort is sustained. Without targeted, special treatment, the stone curlew would find survival in the British countryside much more hazardous. In a sense, we have made things better than they really are.

For the last of our trio, the corncrake, it is already too late over most of lowland Britain. From being the very evocation of still summer nights in hay fields, haunted by the grating, monotonous call, ‘crek crek’, the corncrake now ‘conjures up images of flower-rich meadows of the Hebridean machair’ (Gibbons et. al 1993). Mechanised farming has pushed it to the furthest limits of the British Isles. Beyond the Hebrides and the northern isles it has nowhere left to go. There are only two choices with such a bird – let it die out or go all out to save it. In Britain we do not let birds die out without a fight. In the Western Isles, the RSPB has gone all out by, for example, buying 1,000 hectares on Coll as a corncrake reserve, and offering anyone with corncrakes on their land a subsidy of £60 per hectare for growing hay. The RSPB (and now the EC) pay out about £300,000 a year in this way, and employ up to 35 people to help the corncrakes by planting ‘weed gardens’ and fencing hay fields. Up to a point it works. In 1993 there were 480 calling males in Britain; in 1996 they had increased to 584, and in 2000 there were 621, mostly in the ‘core areas’ of the western and northern isles, but with a few others starting to nest in north-east Scotland. However, helping one rare species can sometimes hurt another. On Coll, ‘corncrake friendly’ management has increased the pressure to improve the pasture in places where there is another endangered species, the Irish lady’s-tresses orchid (Henderson 2001). The orchid is rarer than the corncrake – it occurs nowhere in Europe outside Britain and Ireland – but plants have fewer paid-up supporters than birds. This is likely to be an increasing problem in conservation as the authorities try to unravel the contradictory requirements of upwards of 400 rare species (see Chapter 11). The corncrake project has also attracted criticism because it turns parts of the Hebrides into bird reserves and is alien to the local culture (though surely no more so than any other kind of subsidy). Ian Mitchell (1999) points out, rightly, that the corncrake is not yet endangered worldwide (though it is in western Europe) – nor for that matter is the cirl bunting, which is common in Mediterranean maquis, nor the stone curlew. British efforts to conserve them contribute nothing much in world terms. The honest argument for preserving the full range of species in Britain is that we want to see them here, not somewhere else. If the nightingales desert my Wiltshire valley, it is poor consolation to know they are common in Spain. Beyond that, extinction has reverberations. The loss of a well-known farm bird would be our failure too, a funereal toll that creates a sense of guilt, reminding us of how selfish, useless and nasty we are.

The rarely seen corncrake, victim of changing farming practices. (Natural Image/Mike Lane)

Slowing the engine: surplus reduction and agri-environment schemes

The engine of destruction that removed much of the fine detail of the British landscape between 1940 and 1985, along with much of its wildlife, began to decelerate once production had gone into surplus (some might say it finally blew up and set the cornfield ablaze). It is economics, rather than environmental considerations, that has sent the machine into the garage for repeated overhauls since the 1980s. The first important commodity to go into surplus was milk. The EC decided to apply supply control by introducing quotas in the early 1980s. The milk quota system was a disaster for wildlife. While one might expect less intensive dairy farming to reduce the pressure on marginal land, it made some farmers decide to abandon dairying altogether and grow cereals instead. One result was the ploughing up of wet pastureland on the Culm measures of Devon and Cornwall, and the removal of many of the thick, tangled hedges that characterised this lovely scenery. Today, they survive mainly on nature reserves such as Dunsdon Farm in Devon, which in turn often depend on the dwindling number of farmers who refuse to move with the times.

Set-aside was the European Community’s answer to cereal surpluses. In return for compensatory payments based on acreage, every farm has to set aside 15 per cent of its arable acreage every year. National governments were left some freedom of interpretation, and in Britain we botched it. There were three kinds of set-aside. The commonest was annual ‘fallow’, which was rotated around the farm from year to year, leaving little or no time for much wildlife interest to develop. Worse, the farmer was required to spray or plough set-aside land right in the middle of the nesting season to control weeds. This meant that any bird unwise enough to choose a weedy patch of land to build its nest was liable to lose its entire clutch or brood when the spray booms got to work. The record for what was dubbed the great set-aside massacre of 1993 seems to have been a field in the Yorkshire Dales where the farmer managed to run over two nests of snipe, three lapwing chicks, two clutches of grey partridge plus one of the parents, one skylark’s nest, three meadow pipit’s nests and a willow warbler! Long-term set-aside offered wider options under a Habitat Improvement Scheme, including tree-planting and grazing, but the take-up was limited, and the execution often poor. The best incentive on offer was the Countryside Premium Scheme, introduced in 1989 as a kind of environmental top-up to set-aside plans. However, funds were limited, and the take-up rate modest. On the whole the environmental gains from set-aside were not great. The system was biased in favour of the big cereal farmer, who was paid obscene amounts of money in compensation while allowing him to nullify the scheme’s intention by boosting production on the remaining 85 per cent. As the NCC put it, bluntly enough, set-aside ‘provided only very limited benefits for nature conservation and we now regard it as a missed opportunity’ (NCC 1991).

Long-term set-aside near Ramsbury. It lies on the contours of former downland, but has few of its characteristic insects and plants.

Another incentive to diversify farmland was the introduction of grants to manage farm woodlands (the Farm Woodland Scheme) and plant or maintain hedges (the Hedgerow Incentive Scheme). Until 1986, agricultural grants were pegged to increases in production. Surpluses forced government to change tack, and consider ways of diversifying farm activities. One possibility was putting small woods back into beneficial production, as a source of wood or shelter for game, and for wildlife. Payments were available to reinstate coppicing, a management system that favours many birds, butterflies and wild flowers, and for planting native trees. Free advice was also on hand from the local agricultural service and the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group. The Farm Woodland Scheme brought modest benefits to nature conservation, especially by restoring some of the lost links between isolated woods and hedgerows, or preventing the overgrazing. Unfortunately, the take-up rate has been disappointing. It seems to have been most successful in pastoral Wales (where the scheme is called Coed Cymru) and least so in arable farming areas. Hedgerows, however, have become valued more, and, with greater incentives for their upkeep, the planting and restoration of hedges more or less counterbalances ongoing losses. A regulation introduced in 1996 protects hedges of special historic or ecological value, so long as they are registered with the local authority.

In the mid-1980s, after a damning report on Agriculture and the Environment by the House of Lords, MAFF came up with a scheme to bring more environment-friendly agriculture to areas still noted for their scenic beauty and wildlife. They called these Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA). The idea was based on an earlier scheme to preserve wet pasture in the Broads area. This had been a contentious issue since Halvergate Marshes, the largest area of spacious, uninterrupted grazing marsh in the Broads, was threatened by a pumping scheme in the early 1980s, urged by the local Independent Drainage Board. The new pumps would have lowered the water level of much of the area, enabling local farmers to plough it. The part designated as SSSI was to be spared, although the farmers expected to be compensated for loss of potential income by the NCC. One farmer, dissatisfied with the level of his compensation, started to deepen his ditches and ploughed a giant ‘V’ across one of the fields. Government, having stated that ‘Halvergate is safe for a year’, had to make it so. In March 1985 it launched a Broads Grazing Marsh Compensation Scheme, funded jointly by MAFF and the Countryside Commission, offering all landowners a flat fee of £50 an acre to retain their livestock and the marshland that fed them. Though not munificent, the scheme was accepted as fair, and, helped by the physical collapse of the soil on parts of the recently drained land, it saved Halvergate. (The story is told in detail in the recently published New Naturalist The Broads (Moss 2001)).This was more of a landscape issue than a wildlife one. What mattered was that MAFF was now involved in a scheme that was based on good environmental practice, not on increasing production. It represented a significant broadening of MAFF’s role, and a reluctant admission that the old system of blind, nonstop intensification was no longer what Britain needed or wanted.

Halvergate: the largest expanse of ‘grazing marsh’ on the Norfolk Broads, saved from the plough by an emergency government grant scheme, the forerunner of recent incentives for ‘environmentally sensitive’ farming. (Derek Ratcliffe)

Environmentally Sensitive Areas are administered entirely by MAFF, but are chosen on the advice of the NCC and the Countryside Commission. The basic idea is to offer flat-rate payments that help maintain a farmer’s income while enabling him to work the land in such a way that does not destroy its natural character and beauty. Grant-aid would be based on an agreed management plan. The details vary from place to place. In the Cambrian Mountains, payments are on offer for managing heather moorland by reducing stockage. In other areas payments are aimed at retaining permanent grassland and hedges. The system was voluntary and such things work only when farmers see them as fair and advantageous.

The ESA scheme was gradually extended between 1986 and 1999. For the pilot scheme, the long lists provided to MAFF by the NCC and the Countryside Commission were whittled down to just eight: the Broads, Pennine Dales, Somerset Levels, the eastern half of the South Downs, and Cornwall’s West Penwith area; the Cambrian Mountains in Wales, and Breadalbane and Lomondside in Scotland. Following a reasonably favourable inception, another nine ESAs were formed in 1987 at Breckland, river valleys in Suffolk and Hampshire, another part of the Peak District (North Peak), the Shropshire border, and the rest of the South Downs in England, and the Uist-Benbecula machairs, the Whitlaw and Eildon hills and the Stewartry’s Loch Ken/River Dee area in Scotland. Since then the system has embraced much larger areas – the Lake District, Dartmoor and Exmoor National Parks, Anglesey, the isles of Mull, Islay and Jura, and much of Galloway and the Borders – and now covers about 10 per cent of England’s agricultural land and 20 per cent of Scotland’s. With devolution, new schemes are now replacing ESAs: Tir Gofal (‘Land Care’) in Wales (which combines ESA with the stewardship scheme, Tir Cymen) and the Rural Stewardship Scheme in Scotland.

Do ESAs help wildlife? Well, they do and they don’t. Progress on ESAs is written up in terms of take-up, rather than the areas of natural habitat preserved or restored. They seldom result in the kind of finely-tuned land management that really benefits wildlife. But ESAs have become an institution, and a large number of farms have entered the scheme: some 2,500 in the first 18 months alone. It has helped farmers to maintain or introduce low intensity farming, and address broadly ecological objectives. The scheme nevertheless has or had many flaws. Its flat-rate payments ensured a fairly crude application of management prescriptions. The NCC would have preferred a scale of payments, linked to different degrees of environmental management (it would also like to have extended the ESA scheme over the whole country). At first the payments were unnecessarily niggardly at £8 million a year – a drop in the ocean compared with the often competing grants for agricultural production. As late as 2000, 15 years after the ESA scheme was introduced, only 4 per cent of the agricultural budget supported environmentally sensitive farming. Payments to conserve special habitats, such as water meadows and grass heaths, are available only on certain ESAs. And some ESA prescriptions, for example, for ‘restoring’ chalk grassland, fell well short of that in practice. While over 1,000 hectares of the South Wessex Downs has been ‘restored’ in this way, the result is not the naturally rich ancient turf of chalklands, but sown grassland intermixed with a few herbs. The fact of the matter is that most wildlife habitats cannot be recreated by agricultural techniques, such as sowing. They have to develop naturally, and that takes a long time. Another problem with any overall assessment is lack of data, for MAFF treated ESA farm agreements as confidential. What the scheme did do was to match incentives with local landscape character and make MAFF take direct responsibility for funding wildlife-friendly farming. In its latter stages, the scheme has helped certain declining species, such as marsh fritillary butterflies, by encouraging the right sort of extensive grazing. On the other hand, the ongoing decline of widespread species proves that the scheme is inadequate; to make a real difference production and conservation will need to be balanced more evenly.

The climate of the upper Yorkshire Dales is too harsh for growing corn. Instead the farmers grew natural grass in small walled fields and stored the hay in stone barns. However, chemical fertiliser has made it possible to produce silage, with the consequent disappearance of most of the wild flowers. They survive mainly on verges, river banks and odd corners. (Derek Ratcliffe)

Things are now moving in that direction. In 1999, a new set of CAP reforms known as Agenda 2000 were agreed. In essence, they are another step towards an integrated rural policy, with more funding for extended agri-environment schemes. By 2006, expenditure on environmentally sensitive farming is set to double to over £200 million per year – about 10 per cent of agricultural support – while subsidies for production will fall by 5 per cent. This sounds wonderful, but we should be prepared for disappointment. In his analysis of the reform proposals, the naturalist and farmer Eric Bignell warns that wildlife gain may be limited. While they contain much unfathomable financial tinkering to reduce overproduction and bring EU prices closer to world prices, real opportunities for wildlife are hard to spot. As before, the language may raise expectations only to dash them in practice. Clever exploitation of the new rules should help to ‘extensify’ farming, and maintain beneficial regimes in difficult and remote areas, but it will require a new kind of business canniness, combining husbandry with a keen eye for harvesting grants (Bignell 1999).

Countryside Stewardship is close in conception and practice to ESAs, but on a smaller scale and it is confined to England. Stewardship was introduced in 1990 by the environment White Paper, Our common inheritance. Administered by the Countryside Commission, it seeks to combine wildlife and amenity interests with farming and land management through the usual system of perks and agreements. However, unlike the ESA system, the latter are linked to habitats rather than areas. The pilot Stewardship scheme chose chalk and limestone grassland, lowland heaths, ‘waterside landscapes’, coastal land and ‘uplands’. Later, ‘historic landscapes’, ‘old meadow and pasture’ and ‘hedgerow landscapes’ were added. It has proved popular, and is, indeed, massively oversubscribed; some 4,000 contracts were signed during the first three years of operation, covering some 800 square kilometres and 1,470 kilometres of hedgerow. In 1996, the scheme was taken over by MAFF, perhaps a sign of success. From my impression as a walker, Countryside Stewardship has made a visible contribution to improving the scenery of downs and coastlands by restoring areas of grazed permanent pasture from surplus arable. Parts of the Dorset coastal footpath, for example, have changed from a strip of green between corn and cliff to a more spacious band of grass, a distinct coastal landscape, and I have seen blue butterflies fluttering in fields that until recently were wildlife deserts. Stewardship’s main limitation is that it is a thing of shreds and patches, limited mainly to the agricultural margins. In Wales, this fault has been overcome in the equivalent Tir Cymen (now Tir Gofal) scheme, which is eligible only for whole farms, and thus prevents the farmer from doing what he often did in England, intensifying production on the rest of the holding. Under Tir Cymen, the farmer agrees to observe a code of practice, keep rights of way open and avoid polluting the water, as well as bringing woods, heaths and other unimproved land under positive, sustainable management. Support is available for capital works of all kinds, from fencing and bracken control to nestboxes and hedges. There is even an arable option, in which the farmer is paid to leave broad headlands between fields, something England has yet to introduce, despite much urging to do so by RSPB. Tir Cymen is administered by the Countryside Council for Wales; again an indication of modest success may be the evident eagerness of the Welsh agricultural department to get their hands on it.

The Dorset coast where Countryside Stewardship has had a beneficial effect on the scenery, if not the wildlife.

Organic farming

Organic farmers, as Graham Harvey remarked, ‘plough a lonely furrow’. In 2000 only a single per cent of agricultural land (420,000 hectares) was farmed organically – although even this represents a doubling in the past five years. An encouragement scheme called Organic Aid is co-funded by the UK government and the European Union. The sort of people who want to farm without the aid of chemicals and pesticides tend to be gentle idealists, concerned about health and the environment, and kindness to animals. The successful ones also need a hard-nosed business sense to find markets for their produce. Organic farms should, and probably do, have more wildlife than comparable units that rely on chemical warfare. The nature of organic farming tends to produce mixed farms; cows may be fed on home-grown hay and silage, which means grass and clover fields, and perhaps even wet meadows enriched by river silt. A large organic farm, or an area of continuous organic units might, in time, have better soil and cleaner water. It will have more weeds and insects, and so more of the animals and birds that depend on them. Wildlife bodies often turn to experienced organic farmers for advice and help on running their holdings in a similar way. For as long as consumers share the grower’s values, the future for organic farming looks fairly rosy, though it will probably never exceed a few per cent of agricultural production in Britain (and may one day be routed by cheaper organic food from outside Europe). Organic farming will not by itself sustain the majority of wildlife species, since they are tied to natural habitats. But it offers a vision of a healthier, happier countryside, with bees and grasshoppers, and swallows nesting in the barn. Unfortunately there will never be enough organic farms to make a real difference to the fundamental problems of nutrient enrichment from nitrogenous fertilisers or the pesticide-based sterility of arable Britain.

Straws in the wind

Elmley Marshes on the southern side of the Isle of Sheppey is one of the finest remaining wildernesses on the North Kent marshes. A century ago, a broad wet ribbon of marshland stretched along the Thames estuary from Whitstable almost to the gates of London. It has since been extensively reclaimed for agriculture and industry; about half of it was lost between 1935 and 1982 (Williams & Bowers 1987). In 1951, the NCC had designated as an SSSI some six square kilometres of grazing marsh and ‘fleets’ (tidal channels) at Halstow and Cooling Marshes, the setting for the early chapters of Great Expectations. But SSSI designation did not stop farmers from deepening their ditches and ploughing the dried-out pasture. By 1984, when the NCC resurveyed the site, the once unbroken vista of marsh had become like a war-torn flag, ‘reduced to ribbons and patches, sandwiched among wide new fields of wheat’ (Purseglove 1988). Only high compensation payments saved the remainder from a similar fate. On nearby Sheppey, one farmer, Philip Merricks, was unsatisfied with the negative aspect of SSSI compensation. He felt that if he could not intensify his agricultural holding, he might as well go the whole hog and manage the land properly as a nature reserve (‘If I can’t grow the best wheat, I’ll grow the best birds’). In 1987, Merricks established a trust to look after 729 hectares of Elmley Marshes. Under the terms of an agreement with NCC, water levels were raised, and a low-input regime of sheep grazing established there. It has, by all accounts, been a resounding success. The area of bird-rich grazing marsh now stretches along the southern shore of Sheppey covering some 2,000 hectares. Merricks enlisted experts in wetland management from home and abroad, and, being a farmer himself, has been better able than outsiders to persuade neighbours to follow suit. Populations of waders, such as lapwing and avocet, and wildfowl such as wigeon, have built up over the years, and English Nature’s hides on The Swale at the eastern end of the island now offer some spectacular birdwatching (here the expression ‘birds enough to darken the sky’ is not just a metaphor). Elmley Marshes has attracted much attention, not only as a way of integrating grazing and wildlife management, but as a means of improving wildlife and retaining commercial viability. Philip Merricks is currently deputy chair of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group.

Increasingly, wetlands are also being created on former ploughland. The RSPB provided a template for such projects on its 298-hectare holding at Lakenheath Fen in the Suffolk Breckland, purchased with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund in 1995. The site, on former floodland between a railway line and the Little Ouse river, had been under intensive agriculture, mainly carrots (the peaty soil is top-grade), while the last wet bit had been planted with poplars destined for the matchstick trade. The RSPB are returning it, by stages, into wetland by excavating new channels and ponds, and piping river water into bunded shallows. Like Elmley Marshes, the site will contribute to the national target of 1,200 hectares of newly created reed bed in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (the poplars have been left for the sake of the golden oriole). Some birds have already spotted the opportunity: reed warblers, for example, increased over four years from 4 to over 110 pairs; gadwall and shoveler have bred, and in 1999 a group of bearded tits were seen exploring its potential. In 1997, they found a bug new to Britain. As a sop to the botanists, fen ragwort has been planted there, as part of its ‘recovery programme’. Lakenheath Fen is an oasis of wet in a mainly dry, arable area, but it has demonstrated some of the possibilities of habitat restoration. Other places where wetland habitat, including reed beds, has been created include the National Trust’s Wicken Fen and English Nature’s Stodmarsh reserve in Kent. The same idea is being tried out on at least one commercial farm, Lower Farm near Oxford, which is being systematically restored to the condition it was in 50 years ago, that is, a very wet farm with winter-flooded fields, visited by geese and lapwings.

A small number of farms are run as experiments, with the object of demonstrating ways of reconciling wildlife and profit. On the Hill of White Hammers on Hoy, Roy Harris runs a sheep farm that maintains habitat variety, including coastal heathland, the habitat of the tiny Scottish primrose, and projects a ‘way forward’ for extensive hill farming through conservation grants and local markets. The primrose has, in effect, become the object of a new kind of subsidy, not a crop, but an attractive and symbolically potent ‘wilding’. At Loddington in Leicestershire, a project (the Allerton Project) run by the Game Conservancy and an educational trust, demonstrates that thoughtful use of odd corners and headlands can increase wildlife significantly with little loss of income. High numbers of hare and grey partridges are maintained by diversifying crops, minimising pesticides (or at least by restricting spray times) and leaving field headlands unsprayed. Although this 333-hectare farm has only 43 hectares of permanent grass, barn owls hunt along the field borders, larks sing over most of the farm, and frogs and newts breed in the ponds. With the help of the Countryside Stewardship scheme, all this wildlife costs £5.77 per hectare per year, and even this modest figure is set to fall as agri-environmental schemes come on board (Boatman & Stoate 1999).

Again, the RSPB has taken a lead by purchasing Grange Farm in Cambridgeshire, to ‘trial, demonstrate and advocate new farmland management techniques that favour farmland birds’. It took on the 180-hectare arable farm without knowing what birds were there (they are, in fact, surprisingly diverse), and with the intention of carrying on farming, if possible to normal production levels. By experimenting with cost-effective techniques, capable of emulation by any farmer, the RSPB hopes to demonstrate ways of providing more food for finches, sparrows and buntings in winter, and encouraging birds such as skylark to breed there. Over the next ten years, about a quarter of the farm will be given over to cropping trials, with the portion in set-aside being used to provide extra cover, feeding ground and nest sites. In recognition thereof, they have renamed it Hope Farm.

Since 1986, the farm environment has been in a state of flux, with an increasing amount of agricultural support being switched from production to environmental schemes. This is set to increase over at least the first two decades of the twenty-first century, probably accompanied by diverging systems in England, Scotland and Wales. It is likely to create a yet more extreme polarity between countryside farmed for production and areas maintained mainly for tourism and amenity. It has the potential to make at least parts of the farmed countryside more wildlife-friendly than it is at present. There are fresh problems ahead, with genetically modified crops, invasive species, eutrophication and the shaky state of stock farming in Britain (see Chapter 13). But there is room for measured optimism too. At least we are living in interesting times.

Freeman’s Marsh, near Hungerford, owes much of its natural diversity to flooding and clean water. The beds of stream water-crowfoot, a key species in the chalk-stream ecosystem, became much reduced in the 1990s by low flow-rates and increased silt loads.