Transcript Farming and conservation in the UK

Farming and
conservation in
the UK
Peter Shaw
EGSH10.795S: Conservation
ecology
URL
Introduction
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It is easy to imagine that all land of
conservation interest must be wild,
unmanaged.
No! Most land in the UK has suffered massive
human interference. There is still plenty of
conservation interest!
The dominant influence on the majority of the
UK landscape has been the farmer.
There is a world of difference between the
impacts of a subsistence farmer and modern
intensive farming. Peasants are one of our
most endangered species!
Aims for today:
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To introduce some endangered
farmland species, and identify their
management needs.
To contrast modern farming with
the traditional version.
To explore the impacts of EU policy
decisions.
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Traditional farming may sound like a
conservation idyll. Please remember
that any conservation benefit it carried
was wholly incidental!
Neolithic man cleared large areas of
forest. Medieval men hunted bears,
wolves, wild boar and beavers to
extinction.
It just so happened that traditional
farming imposed a continuous low
intensity management regime for long
periods of time (>1000 years in many
places). Consistency in management
allows specialist spp. to thrive.
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Arable Grasslands.
We must distinguish between meadows
and pastures.
Meadows are used to produce winter
fodder (once hay, now mainly silage).
During spring and early summer animals
are kept off meadows, and at the height of
summer the meadow is cut.
Pastures is simply grazed (intermittently)
all year.
This affects the types of plants which
develop: meadows contain many springflowering spp, while pastures contain
grasses + rosette plants.
Hay, straw and silage
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Straw is outside the scope of today: The coarse
stems of cereals (wheat etc).
Hay has to be cut when the plants have hardened,
and in sunny weather (late June or July). It is
dried, and kept for winter food.
Silage is fermented hay, so can be cut in any
weather, and much earlier in the season (May vs
July). This has implications for conservation of
some birds that were formerly common, as we
shall see.
After cutting, meadows continue to produce some
growth which is grazed in late summer, autumn
and winter.
Hay meadows
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I want to explore the decline of
haymeadows, as an example of the
effects of agricultural intensification.
The traditional meadow management
regime is called the lammas meadow,
in which the land was grazed from
lammas day (12/8) to Lady day (12/2),
then left for hay.
The annual hay cut removed nutrients,
slowly impoverishing the soil.
This proved to be a very stable regime,
and selected for plants which flowered
in spring on low-fertility soils.
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The definitive hay meadow plant
is the snakes head fritillary
Fritillaria meleagris.
Always a plant of damp
meadows in the Thames valley,
it is now down to a handful of
sites - best known being in
Magdelen college Oxford. Other
big colonies are in Wiltshire.
This lily is short-lived, and needs
the combination of an
undisturbed spring (to flower
and seed), and cattle trampling
in autumn (for seed
germination).
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The green winged orchid Orchis
morio (now Anacamptis morio, but
no books have changed yet).
This is said to be widespread and
common - in 1950s floras. I have
only seen it once in my life.
It is a species of old haymeadows,
and is unable to survive under
modern farming systems.
Unlike fritillaries, this plant was
widespread - is just as good an
indicator of haymeadows in
Yorkshire as in Wiltshire.
The Green winged orchid, Orchis morio. (Newly renamed
Anacamptis morio), a plant of unimproved meadows which vanishes
following chemical fertilisation.
Its name comes from the
lateral lobes on its flowers, which
are green lined with purple.
Other hay meadow plants:
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The hemi-parasite Hay rattle
Rhinanthus minor.
Cuckoo flower Cardamine pratensis.
Great Burnett Sanguisorba
officianalis.
Globe flower Trollis europea (damp,
NW only).
Real history:
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Some meadows go back to the
Domesday – even earlier. The same
mowing and grazing dates (give or take
a little annual variation) – plenty of
opportunity for specialists to colonise.
The few that remain are protected by strange
old local bye-laws. Yarnton Meads meadow
is divided into 4 sections, and each year
farmers with permission to graze the meadow
pick an ancient wooden token out of a bag,
identifying the quarter of the meadow which
they are allowed to harvest and subsequently
graze.
The meadow arrangements are still decided
by a court leet – a relic of a manorial court.
The definitive farmland conservation disaster – the corncrake.
It depends on wet haymeadows. Schoolboy books in the 1940s
made jokes about it – every country dweller knew it. Now it faces
global extinction, as intensive farming practices spread.
1969 map.
In Orkney farmers are being paid by the RSPB to
farm in a corncrake-friendly manner. They run
traditional heaymeadows, cut them in late July
(when chicks have hatched), and mow them in a
corncrake-fiendly pattern.
This has cost £500,000, and increased the Orkney
corncrakes by 10 singing males.
Traditional mowing
pattern, trapping animals
and birds in the centre.
Corncrake-friendly:
here the birds are pushed
out of the field to safety.
How to “improve” a
meadow:
Psilocybe semilanceata – a
saprophytic fungus of unimproved
acid meadows.
1: Drain it if needed
2: Plough it up
3: seed with Lolium perenne and
white clover
4: fertilise heavily with NPK
5: Claim your grant money for
doing so.
95% of neutral grasslands were
lost between 1945 and 1990.
PS This will annihilate all
biological interest. All specialist
plant species lost, as are the fungi.
Some fungal genera are notably
sensitive to fertilisers: Hygrocybe,
as is one you may know, the liberty
cap Psilocybe semilanceata.
How to make your own
haymeadow:
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This is now a common thing to do with
conservation areas.
You need a large area (>0.5ha) of sunny
land on a poor soil.
Prepare the site – weedkiller or stripping
the topsoil. (nb this needs planning
permission).
Seed the site with a commercial
‘conservation mix’. Often these are
seeds taken from a traditional
haymeadow (they make more money
from seeds than the hay itself).
Normally you add a cornfield annuals
mix – splashes of rapid colour, keeping
down pernicious weeds.
You have to mow the site. At the same time, every year.
Having mown, you must also remove the hay. This removes
nutrients from the soil, just as in traditional meadows.
In fact mowing is quick and fun – hire an Allen scythe, a hybrid
between a self-propelled lawnmower and a hedge cutter.
The hard bit is removing the hay. I managed a meadow at
CERL. It took me 45 minutes to mow the meadow. It took
7 of us a week to remove the hay. How long to impoverish
the soil? In the region of 100 years, to make much
impact on most soils!
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There used to be a diverse
community of weeds that grew
in cornfields.Their seeds were
about the same size as corn
seeds, so they were hard to
remove.
Modern seed cleaning
techniques have effectively
exterminated these species,
which persist as garden plants.
Sometimes buried seeds come
up, eg when a cutting turns
over old field soil.
Some (eg corncockle,
Agrostemma githago) have
toxic seeds. Should we mourn
this loss of biodiversity?
3 Once-common farmland
birds that have declined
by >50% in the last decade: skylark, lapwing, tree sparrow, corn bunting
Hedges
Hedges help to define the character of the countryside, and act a
valuable biological refuges. Birds, nest, mammals and insects
shelter, woodland plants can persist (notably Dogs mercury) .
1946 to 1976 120,000 miles were removed.
Between 1984 and 1990 85,000 Km hedgerows were removed
(=20% of what was left).This has reduced populations of many
birds notably chaffinchs, sparrows and thrushes.
Hooper’s law
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It is often possible to age a hedge by
reference to historical documents –
maps, parish registers etc. Many are
remarkably old, reflecting ancient
boundaries. (Boundaries generally last
far longer than buildings, or most trees).
Work by Max Hooper of ITE showed that
there was a good relationship between te
species richness of hedges and their
age: count the woody species in 25m,
and that gives you an estimate of the
hedge age in centuries. (Notice that this
is a bit shaky for the first couple of
centuries).
Near Oxford I found a hedge with 8
woody species in this distance – taking it
to early Norman days.
CAP
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The biggest influence on our countryside is
European farm policy. This involves
significant subsidies and a promotion of
agrobusiness – industrial scale farms relying
heavily on mechanisation and
fertiliser/pesticide inputs.
CAP funds have destroyed low-intensity
farming – inevitably followed by vanishing
corncrakes. Irelands corncrakes halved in 5
years in 197s due to changes in EU
subsidies.
The corncrake’s last significant GLOBAL
population is in the peasant farms of eastern
europe. These countries are queuing up to
join the EU, and expect to receive funding to
modernise their agriculture.
The definitive book on the subject is “The
Killing of the countryside” by Graham Harvey,
who is bitter at the way that EU money has
largely destroyed our agricultural biodiversity.