I was in the village pub a while ago when one of the farmers started talking about the absence of fish in the brook running past his farmyard.
He’s a very prosperous farmer. His father used to raise cattle in a way that continued the tradition of the cattle drovers whose drove-road from mid Wales, now neatly surfaced, passes his farm. Bob senior was, I think, skilled in buying scrubby cattle fairly cheaply in markets like Tregaron in West Wales, and bringing them down-country to fatten. When he retired his son Bob took over the farm.
Bob’s main business is still fattening cattle for beef, many of them in covered yards, fed on grass silage and maize silage grown on the farm. I’d say things are going quite well for Bob, though he does get a bit twitchy if you mention vegans.
He’s not a bad chap, Bob, and his prosperity gives him the right to hold forth in the pub from time to time, and to buy drinks for lesser mortals like me. He was kind enough once to offer to let me dispose of some building rubble in a small pond on his land, an offer I very indignantly declined. This time he was lamenting the lack of small fish in the brook that runs past his farmyard.
‘When I was a boy it used to be black with fish’, he says, and I don’t doubt him.
He’d quite like the brook to be full of fish again, if this could be done without affecting his income in any way, and he’s given some thought to the cause of the disappearance of the fish. He’s come to the conclusion that in his father’s time muck of all kinds used to drain into the brook from the farmyard. He seems to think this muck was fish food. He thinks that since ‘the ministry’ has made them take measures to keep this kind of filth out of the brook, the fish have gone ‘because there’s not enough food for them’. (For those who don’t know, farm waste and silage effluent both have a very high ‘biological oxygen demand’ and are extremely toxic both to fish and to the aquatic insects and crustaceans on which the fish depend for their food.) The idea that the poisonous chemicals he and his neighbours use on their fields might affect the fish in the brook does not, curiously, seem to have occurred to him, but then living with cognitive dissonance isn’t his strong point.
I don’t know how many hundreds of acres of Herefordshire Bob owns, but it’s a lot. Four or five hundred acres, maybe more. For all his talk of ‘the ministry’, there isn’t in practice much to constrain his management of this precious part of our (your, your children’s) planet. He is one of 109,000 farmers who like to be portrayed as custodians of the environment of the UK, but I doubt he has had any kind of education in how to do this. It’s not that he doesn’t care, but that he has no idea what to do about it. I think he thinks you just have to keep everything tidy by mowing all the flowers surviving precariously on the road verges. I think he believes there is plenty of wildlife on his farm, but I don’t see it. Just pigeons and crows.
I met him in the pub again, in one of those brief interludes in lockdown when we were allowed to shout at each other from opposite corners of the bar, and blow me down he was talking about the fish again. I think he really would like to do something about it. Which might not be easy. He could talk to the Environment Agency, except their staff have been cut by 25% between 2009 and 2019, and doubtless since, and they weren’t much use before. He could consult Natural England, but their funding was cut by 72% in the same period. Wildlife Trusts can advise farmers, but their resources for this work are very limited. They claim to have advised 5000 farmers a year for the last ten years or so, which is a little over 4% of farmers, but I’m not sure if that has resulted in much change, or how much this has affected the high-chemical- input end of the farming industry.
Even if he got some good advice from one of these sources, Bob’s still got a problem. There’s a local sewage works up the brook. If that releases untreated sewage in overflowing storm water, (which happened in England 200,000 times in 2019) it pollutes his section of the brook, and the Environment Agency will diligently add a digit to an ‘incident statistics’ chart. His upstream neighbours grow mostly wheat and oilseed rape, so their spray residues would get in his brook even if he went organic, which he is not about to do. He’d sooner go vegan. We have a government which has now started relaxing EU bans on neonicotinoids, which were widely used on oilseed rape and are still lingering in ecosystems. If he wants to improve the general level of wildlife on his farm, when 70% of the countryside remains hostile to life (according to Dave Goulson, Professor of 'Life Sciences' at the University of Sussex) that’s a bit of a problem too. Where’s the wildlife going to come in from to repopulate his farm?
Even if Bob knew more about the causes of the problem, he couldn’t do much about it, because he is only a very small part of an industry that is trousering the profits made by the degradation and poisoning of our ecosystems. He is almost as helpless, as an individual, as the rest of us. Being a member of the local Nature Trust is fine and dandy, but it doesn’t change farming practices. It just makes you feel better. Feeding the birds feels good too, but I only get 10* of the 621 species on the British bird list on the bird feeders in my very rural garden. The kinds of changes we need require an agricultural revolution. As individuals we are all as powerless as Bob. We have to find more powerful ways of challenging the orthodoxy that promotes using poisonous chemicals on the land. A couple of weeks ago I pointed out how soon the fenland peat soils will disappear completely under current farming methods. This week I am suggesting that drenching our countryside and ultimately our oceans with poisonous chemicals has already started an ecological disaster and it would make very good sense to stop now instead of waiting for everything to get worse. One day it will have to stop anyway. It’s not sustainable. So we should stop sustaining it. Now. Arguments that we need the sprays and fertilisers to produce food are just an admission that since we turned the weapons of war onto the countryside after the war we haven’t seriously tried to do anything else. Poisons are now the main husbandry technique in our farming and we lack strong incentives to develop alternatives. When I say strong, I mean financial. Farmers seem mostly only to be willing to change their practices if we pay them to.
*11 if you count the sparrowhawk!