One of my aims in these posts has been to interpret the countryside (as far as I am able) for the benefit of those who love it, maybe live in it, but who do not always know what is going on. For those not immersed in farming, the chief clues may lie in the colours of the landscape. This piece is part of an occasional series interpreting these colours for those seeking a deeper appreciation beyond the purely visual.
1.Pink and Yellow
Milkmaids in the meadows carry one set of associations; Cuckooflower is another name for them. Cuckoos are as scarce as milkmaids, but for me the connection is with Orange Tip butterflies. As soon as the pink flowers of the Milkmaids appear in my orchard, the Orange Tip butterflies emerge. The energy of the courtship dances of these butterflies, which spend the winter as pupae, is powered mainly by the nectar of the Cuckooflower. Every spring I count my Cuckooflowers, hoping that they will spread widely like those in my boyhood, and every year there are not enough. But the Orange Tips persist, feeding also on Jack by the Hedge which, like the Cuckooflower and Oilseed Rape, is a member of the cabbage family, and they go dancing around the orchard whenever the sun shines.
When the Cuckooflower does not spread in my wildflower orchard I worry. I scythe the orchard like a hayfield, the sort of hayfield where Cuckooflowers have thrived since hay-meadows were invented, and there are honeybees in plenty. But what I do in my tiny meadow is affected by the wider landscape, and I may be powerless. Things happen in the farmland all around that affect tiny pockets of conservation, like my orchard or the nature reserves around the county. No nature reserve is an island entire of itself, as the man said.
The other morning, with this on my mind, I found myself passing a field of Oilseed Rape, being sprayed in full sunshine, the sprayer dredged yellow with the petals and pollen of the rape flowers. This is dead against all the toothless codes of practice, that stipulate that flowering crops should be sprayed early in the morning before the pollinators are about, but I’m resigned to there being no-one to complain to and no-one to enforce the code of practice that is designed to give the impression that we protect pollinating insects. This field belongs to the estate of a family of baronets who began supplying us with Members of Parliament over two hundred years ago, who should not be able to claim the ignorance of codes of practice that we might tolerate in some dog-and-stick farmer.
Oilseed rape needs pollinating insects - without them there would be a 27% decrease in the number of seeds produced and a 30% decrease in seed weight per pod, and you would think it would be in the farmer’s interest to make sure that pollinators were not killed by sprays. Rape with its cloying perfume and intense colour is almost the only flowering plant left in any quantity in our agricultural landscapes, where all the wildflower meadows have gone and weed-killers ensure there is no heartsease or shepherd’s purse growing harmlessly among the rows of cereals. This throws the world of pollinators on its head, producing a flush of pollen and nectar for a few weeks followed by starvation. But while the bonanza lasts many of the pollinating insects are drawn to the rape fields, a dazzling and intoxicating supply of nectar in what is otherwise a near desert. And when they are there, drinking the nectar in this blindingly golden world, they are sprayed with insecticides. They are also sometimes sprayed with fungicides which we, extraordinarily, have presumed to be harmless to insects simply because they are called fungicides. We need to reclassify these chemicals as biocides; fungicides, according to Dave Goulson, a bee biologist at the University of Sussex, “may be having more profound effects on bees than would have been expected from the standard lab toxicity studies”. New research on fungicides, according to Goulson, “demonstrates very clearly how the cocktail of chemicals used in modern farming makes farmland an inhospitable place for bees”. Those glorious golden rape fields lighting up the patchwork of our countryside are insect traps, drawing in pollinators from across the landscape, to be exposed to that same cocktail of chemicals. The insect Apocalypse is going on right there, especially when some spraying contractor with a big loan cannot be arsed to arrange to spray in the early morning on the off-chance that the code of practice isn’t the charade that I suspect it to be.
Crucially, even if farmers realised that killing pollinators is counter-productive, or if the chemical companies were able to develop something that just killed the beetles and weevils on the rape and nothing else, the very presence of the rape fields in a countryside devoid elsewhere of flowering plants is also in itself a threat to my wildflower orchard. My primroses, my cuckooflowers, and many of the other flowers of our countryside, hanging on in the odd reserve or heritage orchard, may fail to set seed because their pollinators are lured away to the rape fields where they are poisoned. Even if we grew rape organically, the problem for pollinators would persist until conservation and rewilding were able to restore the lost glory of a British countryside spangled with wild flowers and the birds and insects that depend on them, flowering throughout the summer instead of for the brief bonanza of the rape fields, followed by starvation.
One study concludes that ‘the reproductive success of C. pratensis [Cuckooflower or Milkmaids} was influenced by the environment surrounding the plant, both at the local scale through the presence of wild plants and at the landscape scale through the area covered by oilseed rape fields. Flowering oilseed rape area in the landscape reduced seed set of C. pratensis in surrounding permanent grasslands. Consequently, the attractiveness of the crop during its blooming may represent a threat at the landscape scale for both pollinator-specialist (Holzschuh et al., 2011) and pollinator generalist co-flowering wild plants which share similar floral traits with oilseed rape. Future studies focusing on the reproductive success of a higher number of species varying in functional similarity to oilseed rape would be essential to confirm the hypothesis that species closely related to oilseed rape are more likely to be influenced by oilseed rape.’
While insect decline continues, specialist plants and insects, such as Orange Tip butterflies and Cuckooflowers, are likely to disappear first if their relationships break down – if there are no Orange Tips to pollinate the Cuckooflowers, or no Cuckooflowers to feed the Orange tips. Flowering plants or shrubs like Hawthorn, which are less fussy about pollinators, will suffer less, but even if Hawthorn can be pollinated by many insects, there may be insects that depend entirely on Hawthorn. An ignorant decision to clear Hawthorn from Moccas Deerpark, because it was seen as scrub, nearly resulted in the extinction of the Moccas Beetle which at that time was thought to be unique to Moccas. The adult beetles are entirely dependent on Hawthorn nectar.
The popularity of rape as a crop is partly linked to the popularity of growing wheat. There are a large number of arable farmers who have a remarkably limited farming repertoire, and a style that gives a good hard work to profit ratio. Growing wheat is relatively simple but it is not possible to grow it year after year on the same ground. To grow wheat conventionally you need the normal cultivation machinery plus a seed drill, a combine and a sprayer. The simplest way to create a rotation that gives the land a break from wheat is to grow crops such as oilseed rape and field beans. These are all called ‘combinable crops’ because you can harvest them all with a combine harvester. I came across one farm near Bromyard where the owner had been able to move to Australia and arrange for his land to be farmed entirely by contractors contacted by phone. There may be farmers who have a deep spiritual connection to their land and a huge repertoire of skills and knowledge passed down through generations, but those whose farming consists of a rotation of three or four combinable crops and an ever-ready sprayer are not they.
2 - Dirty Yellow
You’ll have noticed quite a few fields that have turned a dirty kind of yellow, or a yellowish brown, or sometimes even reddish, and may have wondered what is going on there, to which the answer might be both nothing and an awful lot.
Sometime in the middle ages the mouldboard plough caught on. It took a bit more ox-power to pull, it, but the curved mouldboard or ploughshare turned each furrow almost completely upside down, which buried any weeds. Before that the earlier tool, the ‘ard’, just scratched the surface, which is now quite interesting in view of the modern debate about ploughing versus minimum cultivation and direct drilling. Weeds have always been an issue in agriculture, of course, because they can compete with or choke crops, and being able to bury them with the plough was very handy. Medieval peasants had many ways of dealing with weeds, but they are not likely to have seen it as desirable to eradicate them altogether, and they were able to share the countryside with many creatures in a food chain powered by the nectar, pollen, leaves and seeds of the plants we now call weeds. Nowadays weeds can be killed with weed-killers; we can have fields with nothing in except the crop, and since we can, we do; and although organic farmers manage perfectly well without weed-killers, all the chemical farmers use them without turning a hair.
Those dirty yellow fields will have been sprayed with the weedkiller Glyphosate, sometimes in an even more toxic cocktail of other chemicals, sometimes marketed as Roundup. This was introduced by Monsanto in 1974, a weedkiller that was improbably - even paradoxically - touted as being very widely effective but of low toxicity. It was discovered by accident that some possible water-softening chemicals seemed to kill plants, which led to further research and eventually to Roundup, and maybe a lucky escape for those of us who need our water softened.
Pesticides like Roundup are supported vociferously by those who make money from them, and this support includes providing the ‘safety data’ themselves and ‘encouraging’ researchers to produce research conclusions favourable to the manufacturer, and putting pressure on regulatory agencies to licence or approve their products. There is much scientific research suggesting that glyphosate, and the various mixtures that contain it, can be harmful to humans, to wildlife and to soil bacteria. Without labouring the point I'll just say that for a weedkiller that overwhelmingly dominates agriculture worldwide to be the subject of a debate about its safety (that has only got more intense in the fifty years or so since it was launched) is not a good state of affairs. If it is to be used in vast quantities worldwide the information about its safety ought to be robust, and it is at present arguably anything but. There is little doubt that the manufacturers do their utmost to provide evidence that their product is safe, and there is a great deal of evidence that it may, for example, cause cancer in humans, deformities and endocrine disruption in some animals, harm aquatic life and even reduce the activity of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil, and so on. There is no doubt whatsoever that it plays a part in the continuing loss of biodiversity in countries like the UK; the only doubt is about just how large that part is. Just killing off wild flowering and seed-bearing plants is in itself enough, of course, to trigger insect losses and bird losses, without starting on its other toxic properties.
Roundup/Glyphosate has become central to two modern agricultural controversies, Genetic Modification and Regenerative Agriculture. It cannot be used on normal growing crops because it kills them, although it is very widely used to kill everything before fields are ploughed, leaving fields that strange dirty yellow of dead plants with which we started off. It is also sprayed on cereals to desiccate the ripening plants, by farmers too impatient to wait for their crops to ripen naturally. Because it is too deadly to be used to kill weeds in growing crops, the manufacturers became involved in the development of ‘Roundup Ready’ crops – crop plants that had been genetically modified so that you could spray them with Roundup to kill weeds without killing the crop. GM crops modified so that you had to use Roundup on them – nice work if you can get it, but probably part of the spiral of weeds developing resistance to herbicides followed by manufacturers developing new herbicides, a spiral that caused the blackgrass problem farmers go on about all the time, caused entirely by overuse of herbicides and poor crop rotations but doubtless solved by the application of ever newer herbicides. GM crops, touted as bringing benefits to mankind by engineering resistance to diseases, seem so far to be mainly bringing benefits to the chemical manufacturers by engineering plants resistant to a powerful biocide and thus encouraging its use.
The other controversy, hinted at when I mentioned medieval ploughs, is to do with Regenerative Agriculture. This is a farmer-led revolution which has been pioneered by various inspirational but not necessarily well-qualified figures and taken up by farmers who are uneasy about the impacts of agricultural practices. The state of the soil is crucial to this movement, and they believe that soil fertility is damaged by cultivation, which they say disrupts microbes and fungi in the soil. They therefore advocate minimal cultivation, using machines which scratch the surface and drill seeds directly into uncultivated fields. They also advocate using cover crops to protect the soil. Many of them say they would like to reduce their use of chemical fertilisers and sprays, but they rarely aim to cut them out altogether – for them going organic is a step too far.
And so by what I might call an irony were the word not so over-used, the Regenerative Farmers who claim to lead a movement towards a more nature-friendly farming seem to have become utterly dependent on glyphosate and its other toxic permutations to poison all the plants in their fields in order to make their minimal cultivation and direct drilling weed-free in the simplest but most controversial way possible.
Conventional farming uses vast amounts of fossil fuels to produce the nitrate fertilisers to which it has become addicted. Regenerative farming, which ideally seeks other sources of fertility such as composting, better microbial and fungal action in the soil, and the use of legumes like clover to fix atmospheric nitrogen, has unfortunately become dependent on glyphosate, which inhibits the nitrogen-fixing bacteria they need in the soil and in the nodules on the clover roots , which fix the nitrogen they need to improve their soil fertility without using and emitting the greenhouse gases produced at all stages of the manufacture and use of bag nitrogen. Regenerative Agriculture has a long way to go. It is only scratching the surface of the problem. It is also in general very keen to find a place for cattle and sheep in the search for healthier and more fertile soils, and reluctant to concede that we need to reduce our intake of animal products.
Sometimes I just have to endure your articles because I want to be informed. We have always disliked rape, and you gave me even more reasons to do so.
But I think I am more fortunate than you, because I have just come back from a walk through coppiced woodland loud with birdsong and thick with flora. There were; primroses, yellow archangel,, red dead nettle, bugle, violets, wood anemone, stitchwort, Jewelweeds, comfrey,, jack by the hedge, and lakes of bluebells
We saw a family of long tailed tits, robin, wren, blackbird, thrush, chaffinches, and the ultimate prize house Martin's, though sadly only five