There will be those who think I was overly hostile to sheep farmers in my last post because I was critical of sheep farming on our uplands. There may be those who think that rural farming communities – in mid-Wales, for example – need support, and I would be interested to know why they think so. Are farmers, for example, a national asset, or are they businessmen exploiting the national asset that is our land, our soil, our nature? Do rural communities have special values that we might want to preserve? If so, what are they? Are hill farmers protecting and looking after our countryside, or are their methods causing extensive ecosystem damage? Should they be supported if they actually look after the countryside, and not if they don’t? Do we ultimately value farmers more because they are human beings like us, or do we prioritise the health of ecosystems because they are the life support systems on which human beings like us depend? Are farmers more precious if they still speak a threatened language that we may wish to encourage? Are they entitled to pursue their traditional way of life even if they cannot do so without support from the taxpayer, or even if it perpetuates historical damage to fragile ecosystems? Most of these questions would be worth asking whether or not our uplands were being grazed by sheep, nibbling at our hills like great white maggots.
Sheep have had a central place in our upland farming communities for hundreds of years, so central that it is often assumed – by Welsh politicians, for example -that without sheep these communities might collapse. But it may be that without sheep these areas might be more productive not only ecologically but also by offering more rewarding opportunities for the people who live there. I opt at this point to start to use the phrase ‘the people who live there’ rather than ‘rural communities’ because all the assumptions tied up in the phrase ‘rural community’ perpetuate a view of rural life which is no longer real. If we are to put the needs of a supposed ‘rural community’ up against the suggestion of radically changing the way we look after our uplands, it is not helpful not to understand how rural communities now contain many people with no tie to the land except a preference for whatever qualities they see as being part of country life. Many of these people have displaced others who had ties to the land but can’t compete for housing, and many farm workers come from town or from other countries. If land management is to change life in the countryside it might be useful to get real about who actually lives in the countryside.
I live in a large parish that has been an agricultural community since whatever date you want to pick. But it isn’t now. There’s one man who rents a few fields here and there to raise some sheep, but his main income is from building. There’s another –a bachelor – who raises sheep on a small farm in a relatively harmonious manner, I think, and sees himself as a traditionalist. There’s another very similar small farmer up the lane, a sheep man from Radnorshire originally. Another man has a few acres he uses to produce small bales of sweet hay for the horsey people, who mainly makes his living as a fencing contractor. There’s a young woman involved with farm computers, so we need to include her too. The rest of the land in the parish belongs to a very large estate based in the next parish but one, the sort of farm run by agronomists advising on the liberal use of chemicals. And there’s some land in the parish that has been bought by a farmer from the next parish, who has a large beef rearing operation. Only two of these farm businesses employ workers, or three if you count the fencing contractor’s assistant. It would be difficult to work out just how many people make their living here from farming and related trades, but you wouldn’t be far out if you said six and a couple of halves. Everyone else here is retired or works in town, pretty much.
In Radnorshire, which I know fairly well, there is a much stronger rural community, in the sense that there are fewer villages full of people who work in town. Many of the farms are quite small and have two main sources of income. Most of them have sheep, grazing in summer on common land. Often their farms are not big enough for year-round support for the sheep they have on the hill, and in winter they often put them out ‘at tack’, which means paying lowland farmers to provide grazing and sometimes to keep an eye on them. So the common grazing has encouraged farmers to keep numbers of sheep that their farms cannot support in winter, because these farmers depend on the hill grazing subsidies devised by the EU, that have been paid, and are still being paid, by the hectare, in this case for land that they don’t own. When farmers have sheep grazing on these commons they are paid according to the proportion of the sheep on the common grazings that belong to them. If half the sheep on the common are yours, you will get half the hill subsidy payable on that acreage of common grazing land. There are long established traditional rules about how many sheep each farmer can keep on the hills, but in general having access to these subsidies is what makes hill sheep farming possible, even profitable, if a subsidy can be said to be a profit. I have heard stories of quite extraordinary sums of money in the form of subsidies being paid to graziers on the common land in the Brecon Beacons.
Most of these sheep farmers have branched out into industrial farming and will have some kind of factory-farming set up on the farm. Most of these are poultry units of some sort, set up not only at a considerable distance from the market but also from the supplies of chicken feed coming in to Avonmouth and being trucked into the heart of Wales, all increasing the carbon footprint. I don’t know how this was allowed to happen, or to what extent it was because farmers are not confident of the future of sheep farming and wanted an alternative, but it has now got to the point of being a major source of pollution of the local rivers, mainly caused by phosphate run-off, and also of ammonia, a major greenhouse gas. And there is very little in the way of attempts to limit or capture or in any way regulate this pollution, except a declaration by Powys council that the county has now reached ‘peak chicken’ and that no more chicken units will get planning permission. In other words, the pollution is acknowledged not to be tolerable, but will be allowed to continue at current levels none the less. Most of the farms now have these units anyway, and if they can’t get planning permission for chicken sheds they’ll probably be allowed pig units instead. God help us if we ever reach ‘peak pig’.
These farming operations are unsustainable in that they degrade the land, by keeping the vegetation of the hills very sparse and impoverished and making it a very poor habitat for other species; they pollute the watercourses with the run-off from the chicken units and the chemicals used to treat the sheep for sheep-scab; and they contribute to global warming by the release of ammonia from the chicken manure and the carbon di-oxide released by all the feed trucks, egg trucks and chicken transporters.
The predictable response that we need eggs and chickens, though we clearly do, is irrelevant to my argument here because I am concerned with the situation of rural communities forced to make a living in very unsustainable ways, because most of the land they farm is not suitable for farming and their industrial units have no connection with the land on which they sit and are not able to function by growing the chicken food locally. Most of the feed comes from deeply questionable industrial fishing and from growing soya beans where there should be forests, so that this farming community is contributing to the destruction of ecosystems elsewhere in the world as well as its own.
My argument for rewilding these hill areas is an argument for revitalising them, creating a richer ecology full of a wider range of species and resources, and allowing their peatlands to recover and creating slower run off of rainwater. I argued in my piece on Whittlesey Mere that the original fens, like the Amazon forests, had a great intrinsic richness beyond anything that is possible in drained carrot fields or Brazilian ranches, and that the exploitation of that richness by the drainers and carrot farmers (and ranchers) has replaced a general communal richness that belonged in a sense to all humanity, with riches for a few powerful ambitious individuals, leading to a continuing degradation of the ecosystem. The same is true of our mountains, so damaged that farmers are unable to farm them in any way sustainably. Allowing the hill land and the whole upland ecosystem to recover and regenerate would benefit everyone, including the farming community whose opportunities would expand as the ecosystem recovered.
Nature trusts are now campaigning, using the slogan ’30 x 30’, to preserve or reserve 30% of the UK for nature by 2030. Boris Johnson has even mentioned this, although he hasn’t actually proclaimed that a number of millions – the number he first thought of - will be allocated to this. But if we are to be serious about this our uplands seem to me to be the obvious place to start. Upland grazings in fact account for maybe a third of the UK land area, and often they are owned by people who have never been able to ‘use’ them because of the common rights of others to the same land. Our proposed new post-Brexit agricultural regime should make it possible for farmers to be paid to replace sheep with conservation, peatland recovery and regeneration of tree cover. Although the vegetation of our upland landscapes has been overgrazed and burned for centuries, there are still relict populations of the plants such as heather and bilberry, juniper, willow and bog myrtle that would have formed the understorey of the original woodlands. If areas of native trees were established in treeless areas to provide seed sources, and grazing pressure was relieved or removed so that trees could start to spread from the crags and gullies where sheep can’t get at them, we might soon get a sense of what upland ecosystem restoration might look like, because these trees would be growing among the plants that made up the understorey of the original forests. Our moorlands are forests without the trees.
Or you could visit the many projects in Scotland such as Glenfeshie, or Alladale Wilderness Reserve, or Carifran, or the areas around Invermorriston being rewilded by Trees for Life. What I am suggesting is actually already being done in many parts of Scotland. It isn’t my private fantasy, it is vital work being done now by dynamic organisations and dedicated individuals on a landscape scale. You can go and see the reality yourself. At Mar Lodge Estate, where deer and sheep prevented the growth of new trees around the old ‘granny pines’, there is now burgeoning new Caledonian Forest, where birch and young pines are thrusting upwards among the venerable old pine trees and there is new habitat for the crossbills and red squirrels and pine martens and so on. It is inspiring and bloody beautiful. Because they simply took the sheep away. That was pretty well all it took.
To restore the fens much can be achieved by just adding water. On our uplands much can be achieved by just removing sheep. What puzzles me is that almost nothing of the kind is being done in England. But I like to think that there is an idea alive in the land that will eventually be utterly transformative.