New Woodlands

We have some steep north facing slopes on the farm that are gradually being taken over by encroaching bracken. Azulox has been phased out for spraying bracken and the slopes are too steep for machinery. Even with heavy grazing or hoof pressure there is no realistic cost-efficient way of controlling the bracken and we are seeing ticks here for the first time. When the dogs run through the bracken in summer they come back with ticks on them and we get them sometimes too. Ticks can transmit Lyme Disease, and we had a friend called Colin who contracted it this way in Scotland. He suffered for several years before committing suicide. It’s a nasty disease.

So we decided to plant this small block of about 7 acres back into woodland. Our stewardship scheme in Wales, Tir Gofal, had finished and with the changes in Single Farm Payments, although we have each year ticked the box expressing interest in Glastir, which is the re-vamped ‘greening’ scheme, we have been unable to obtain any response from the powers that be. Theoretically there have been good grants for woodland plantings, but we have been unable to get a coherent response from anyone. They keep saying that grants are not available at the moment and we have to wait.

Meanwhile the bracken has advanced alarmingly, year on year. What started as a mere pubescent student’s beard has turned into a marauding Mongolian horde. If we don’t plant it soon, the whole slope will be solid bracken.

We have a modest tree nursery in the Bevis shed where we grow a few hundred trees. I try to plant on average two trees a day and have managed to do this for the last 26 years. 2014 was a good acorn year and we collected a lot of acorns, and also quite a bit of beech mast, for the tree nursery. I gathered many of them from the woodlands belonging to a friend called Tula. She is struggling at the moment with oesophageal cancer, and so we decided to name the new woodland ‘Tula’s Wood’. The seedlings had reached 30-60 cm and I had planted them out into individual pots last year so that they could grow large enough to outcompete surrounding vegetation, and also could be planted out later in the spring. We also bought in some bare rooted stock of species we don’t have enough of, such as field maple. We wanted to keep some open areas and also not shade out the tracks too closely, so Drew has planted those fringes with guilder rose. We also obtained some good quality cob nuts and grew them on, so that the hazels will be a good productive strain. We’d like to bring back the elms but resistant trees are very expensive. So we bought in some wych-elm as a substitute. We have one wych elm tree on the farm, in old woodland below the lake, so we thought it was time it had some moral support!

Over the wet winter, Drew has been very busy planting out the bare-rooted stock, and Neil and Dai got on with the fencing. Before it was finally stock proof the tack sheep kept getting in, but although they ate out a few tops, by and large they helped clean out the old field.

Drew had been marking the new trees with canes, but in total there are still large areas of the bank still unplanted. The trees are placed randomly and naturally and we have not used tree guards because we have no deer and there are only a couple of rabbits on this cold north facing slope. If they start to get any big ideas we will re-cycle them and keep the trees safe until the leaders are too high for animals to bite off.

Our experience on the farm has shown that the only way to stop the young trees being choked and lost in the bracken is to spray around them in their first season. So Drew has been busy scrambling across the slope with a back pack sprayer. A blue dye in the spray enables him to see which trees he has done. Now the bracken is starting to uncurl the first leaf and before too long everything will become engulfed.

But in the autumn of 2014, when there were plenty of acorns, the jays got busy, and they hid acorns and some hazel nuts all over the slopes. Now these have sprouted. These seedlings also need marking and protecting, so I have been out with canes this week looking for the first red leaves of the tiny oak trees. So far I have put out over 450 canes, and there are still more trees to find. The old ash trees up at the top west end of the slope have also managed to spread their wind-blown seeds a hundred metres or so into the field. So natural re-seeding from surrounding trees is already well on the way to getting this woodland established. No grants, no costs to the tax-payer, no forms, no administration charges. Thank you jays, thank you wind, and thank you to the surrounding trees and Tula for providing the seeds.

Nick

Hide Building

We are busy planking up some of the larch that Nick planted over 30 years ago. It’s great to be able to use our home grown timber on projects such as the new hide.

Pete Busy with the Wood-Mizer

 

 

Rewilding and More

I attended a conference titled ‘Re-wilding Dorset’ last week. I stayed overnight with Bevis Trust Trustee Kate Hall, whose husband Tim is Farm Manager on the Cranbourne Estate. This estate formerly had a shoot based on farmed gamebirds but recently Lord Cranbourne has decided to switch solely to wild indigenous Grey Partridges. Whatever one’s views may be on gamebird shooting, managing land for wild game certainly has knock on benefits for other wildlife. The gamekeepers come down hard on foxes and corvids, allowing many species to flourish with reduced predation pressure. Meanwhile the habitat is managed for partridges with beetle banks, wide fallow strips alongside hedges, and wide bare headlands that allow the young partridges to dry out in the sun. A wet spring with sodden vegetation is deadly for chilling young partridges, and they need plenty of high protein insect food in their early days. These conditions also suit lapwings, which we saw, and maybe – who knows – stone curlews will return. Some of these habitat management techniques were pioneered by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, based on systems used in parts of Europe where game-rearing is not allowed.

The whole Dorset area has gone upmarket, with mums in Range Rovers driving kids to school. So I called in at Ashmore, up on the downs, where I had lived as a child in conditions similar to Bevis, in Richard Jefferies’ book. This too has been twee’d up. It looks beautiful, but the school is long closed and many of the houses are holiday cottages, with big money having taken over the manor houses. The old dewpond in the centre of the village now has neatly mown banks. As a five year old I used to bring the cows up the lane and water them in the pond, before bringing them in for hand milking. One of my first jobs was to collect duck and geese eggs and wash them ready for sale. The geese lived in wooden arks by the pond and were almost taller than me. When I peered into the darkness of the ark I was greeted with a terrifying hiss. After one gander chased me up the hill on my tricycle an old gaffer told me that the best thing to do was to get a big stick and hit him on the head. But I could never get close enough! The churchyard too, where my younger brother had got his head stuck in the railings, has been neatly mowed to a perfect lawn. No room any more for the slow-worms that I used to collect. I looked in the glebe field where my pony Sooty used to live, under the eagle eye of the school mistress, Miss Canavan. There used to be two Guernseys in there and sometimes I would help make the butter in the little cottage across the road. The old folk were only too happy for us energetic youngsters to take a turn on the handle until the butter started to go slap-slap.

Ashmore 1959

Ashmore 2016

The conference was a useful forum for meeting people although much of the content was a little woolly, with people struggling to identify what they meant by ‘re-wilding’. The term has got itself a bad name because there is so much focus on wolves and lynx. While there may be scope for an experimental wolf pack up in remote Allladale, the concept of wolves in England and Wales is not realistic. The pressure on land, and the attitudes of people, could not cope with them. I’m reminded of a CITES conference I attended in Nairobi some years ago, where the British contingent were earnestly banging on about elephant conservation, preaching to the locals. After the session, a delegate from one of the African countries said to me: ‘It’s all very well but we have about 10,000 surplus elephants causing immense damage to the habitats and to the impoverished farmers whose crops are wrecked. Could you take them in Britain?’ I had visions of 10,000 elephants being off-loaded from Heathrow and rampaging down Slough High Street before dispersing across southern Britain. The fact is, we want these charismatic animals, as long as someone else puts up with them. Let’s keep them where they belong – on TV.

So one of the questions I asked at the conference was: How many of the delegates were farmers? It turned out there were three of us, and only one was from Dorset. Had the conference been advertised in the wrong sector? Re-wilding can become hopelessly idealistic unless the people who are responsible for the land are fully engaged from the start. National Trust plans for re-instating parts of Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath are great. But as for the private sector, it looks right now as though Lord Cranbourne’s efforts for wild Grey Partridges is the best show in town.

Nick

Farm Payments and More

We’ve just completed our Single Farm Payment application. Some people think farmers are rolling in it, and who knows, maybe the barley barons in the east are doing very well. Here in Wales, the story is very different.

About 15 years or so ago, the farm payments switched from headage payments (paying per head of sheep or cattle on the farm) to area payments (how many hectares are being farmed.) On the retrospective base date that this happened, we had just let out most of our land for grazing tack cattle and for silage and this meant that the payment quotas went to those temporary tenants and none to the farm at all. After a decade of no payments, we decided that we would have to buy quota to farm our own farm. This cost us £37,000.

When you get quota of entitlements to payments you are then subject to a growing handbook of compliances and inspections. This gets more onerous every year.

Last year Rural Payments Wales decided to run the whole process online, even though many Welsh farmers do not have computers or an internet connection. The online system collapsed and they changed back to a paper system a few weeks before the closing date. This year they only accept online applications, which basically means that you have to use an agent, because the whole process is so complex and the penalties for even the smallest errors are onerous. Our NFU agent, Peter Williams, patiently explained all the latest details for us.

The applications are based on maps, that can be seen online but you cannot print them off, so if you have no internet you cannot access them. Previously all updates of the maps were relayed up to Aberystwyth in note form to be entered on the main maps. And the Tir Gofal (stewardship) maps were different to the SFP maps, with different field numbers and habitats categories. So nothing matched. Now at least they are all under one map and can be updated by the farmers themselves.

We were on Tir Gofal for ten years, and under this scheme we had to run down the fertility of some of our fields to promote wild flowers and we were not allowed to mow hay before 15^th July. All great stuff in theory. The reality is somewhat different. Wild flowers do not magically appear in fields, all we got was buttercups that the livestock avoid. By July all the seeds of the grasses have dropped so the protein value of the feed is low; all you have left is old dry stalks – basically old rope. And nobody makes hay nowadays anyway, it is all silage. Contractors can be in and out to make silage in three days, whereas hay takes longer to air dry and many years the hay crop failed due to wet weather. Sometimes you could not even burn it. So the only option was to graze those fields all through spring, which defeats the whole object of the exercise. Now Tir Gofal is finished and the fields are back to normal farming, a wasted exercise all round.

The thrust now is to put less funding into farming and more support into conservation. This supposedly is the theory, but it does not translate into reality. Last year we had to map every tree within each field boundary, so that its shade area could be deducted from the claimed field area. What a performance! Then RPW realised that this was simply incentivising farmers to cut down the trees to save their payments, so at the last minute, having done all the work, we were told to abandon it. On our farm, we have planted all the odd corners with trees, and made new woods and ponds. These total 30% of the land area. None of this land is eligible for farm payments. We only get paid for land that is in ‘agricultural condition’. For example, as the best farm in Wales for Brown Hairstreak Butterflies, we have fenced off several hectares for blackthorn for butterflies. As a result we get penalised for this by deducting the area from our farm payments. So the incentive is not to have wildlife but only grass. And our payment is due to halve over the next five years, from £9,437 to £4,737. We get a 25%  ‘greening payment’ on top and this is due to increase over five years. This of course will not persuade the average farmer to become more wildlife friendly.

Fifteen years ago we decided to plant up some areas into new woodlands and applied for a Woodland Grant Scheme. But again, compliance is the name of the game and we ended up with a contractor planting regimented rows of imported ash (which now has ash-dieback disease) and larch (which is subject to Phytopthera.).  Now we are being told to chop it all down and replace with a broad mix of species! We learnt this lesson the hard way and instead we grow our own trees from seed and plant them out randomly, no rows, no monocultures.

But why farm at all? The average Welsh farmer’s wage is about £4.30 per hour for a 60 hour week – no minimum wage for the self-employed. Bottled milk is cheaper than bottled water and dairy farms are going out of business everywhere. Most of our food is imported into UK from other countries that do not have the same welfare standards as us, and whose farming is often at the expense of precious wildlife habitats. Paradoxically land prices have escalated so it is almost impossible to get into farming. The average Welsh farmer is close to retirement. Bovine Tb is now running totally out of control. So we have a perfect storm for farming. Farming is also a multi-skilled job, and most farmers have themselves been brought up on farms. It is not something that you can easily pick up, and even the agricultural colleges are changing most of their courses from agriculture to leisure industry. Once a skilled workforce is lost, it is an uphill struggle to revive it.

The human population is increasing every year. Food demand is increasing but the prices as a percent of income have never been so low. 18% of food is wasted. It is not allowed to be re-cycled for pig food.  Many farm margins are in negative. Wildlife in the farmed landscape is paid lip service only. Farmers are urged to ‘diversify’ which is politic speak for ‘get another job’. We are wrapped up in red tape and sapped of all initiative.

Will Welsh farming go the Monbiot route and become abandoned land, returning to Wild Wood filled with Bison (don’t forget to double ear tag them and get them in for Tb testing)? Or can Wales be self-sufficient for food while at the same time enriching its wildlife heritage? This is what the Bevis Trust is all about.

Nick

Habitat Creation

Over the weekend we saw the first dipper on the farm. This engaging little bird was not on our species list and the fact that it has now appeared can most likely be due to the beavers creating the type of habitat favoured by the dipper. We have also had a whimbrel passing through recently, though I don’t think the beavers can take credit for that one.

Drew

April

30 April 2016

I like April, it’s like a strip tease in reverse. The farm is down to its bare bones after the winter, everything is visible. And then we get a few sunny days and the trees put on their first delicate leaves, like gossamer underwear, with sunlight dappling through them.

We lamb in April, timed so that the ewes get a first bite of spring grass to make milk. Neighbours who lamb early in an attempt to catch the early season premium lamb prices, have to lamb inside. That means a lot of fuss, with lambing cubicles, bedding, provision of hard feed, nightly checks and vigils, pulling lambs and mothering on orphans or spares from triplets. We prefer to lamb the natural way, out in the fields, selecting fields with a little bit of shelter from the elements, and close to the house for easy checking. Our thick hedges and shelterbelts not only favour wildlife, they provide little warm patches for the ewes to camp down in with their lambs.

I came in for lunch the other day and looked out of the window to see a ewe straining a little. Her udder was bagged up and she was all set to lamb. Sure enough, a few moments later, out squirted a slimy yellow lamb in a squirming heap. The old girl turned round and started to lick it, quite roughly, stimulating it into sturdy life. Before I’d finished my soup she dropped another one, this time onto a molehill so it got all dirty. And by the time I’d had my cup of tea both lambs were on their feet, very tottery but with a fierce instinct to find a teat. Soon Drew would be round, checking them all, with his elastrator handy to put rubber rings on their tails and testicles. Later, when their ears are stronger, we double tag them to comply with EU regulations. But that’s another story.

Of course lambing out exposes sheep to predators. One bad year we lost seven heavy fleeced wet ewes to crows. Big in lamb, and with a heavy wet fleece, they cannot easily get up when cast. The ravens and crows are quick to spot the predicament. First they peck out her top eye, then rip at her udder until the intestines are exposed. If she has started to lamb, they peck out the lamb’s tongue before it is born. The other predator is the fox. We’ve only lost four lambs this year to foxes. It’s hard to tell if the fox has killed the lamb, or scavenged a dead one. If the lamb is still yellow, then it probably died naturally at birth, or maybe the fox grabbed it while the mother was struggling to give birth to her second lamb. But if the lamb was clean and bonny, then clearly it had been alive. In prolonged cold wind and rain lambs go down with chill or pneumonia, but this year the weather has been quite fair over lambing time and the dead lambs have looked strong. I watched the fox in the lambing field. He looked like a dog fox to me, with a boxy-looking face. Usually a vixen has a litter in the wood, down below the lake. Most of the time the fox was gleaning for afterbirths and the ewes just move uneasily away. But the evidence is there in the morning, a half-eaten lamb. Does the blood indicate it was alive when it was found by the fox? A vixen would have taken the carcase away down to the den, but this fox had left it behind. We put the remains in a cage trap but the fox will not go in. Drew went out with a rifle lamping, but saw no fox, just two badgers bumbling along. With lambing almost over, the fox switches to other fare. The rough grass areas are good hunting grounds for finding field vole nests, and soon there will be ducklings and goslings to add variety.

With the country laid bare, everything is visible. In the hedges you can see where the rats are running, and a fresh rabbit stop, blocked up while mum is away. And sadly, signs that humans have been here. A country lane bisects the farm, and with humans comes their litter. We keep collecting it; it’s a never-ending struggle. The litter comes in three types (yes, I’m an expert!): fag packets, with their dire health warnings, fast food wrappings and crisp packets, and energy drinks. It seems that Red Bull and so on does not actually provide sufficient energy for the consumer to find a rubbish bin. Carmarthenshire is a third world country when it comes to litter, something on a par with Egypt.

I can’t stay anywhere for long. I’m being told off all the time. Down at the log cabin last evening a moorhen had built a nest right under where I sit. A Canada goose bedded comfortably in a nest of her own down on the island stared at me, frozen, unmoving for over an hour. A pair of greylags arrived yesterday with five day old goslings and slunk away along the reed edge, heads held low. A wagtail, having waited patiently for me to leave, finally came up to me and just stared at me, wanting to get back onto its nest. And an extremely podgy water vole floated with totally dry fur on the other side of the pond, eying me like a mini-beaver, then plopping under water to magically disappear without any further ripples or bubbles. The water vole tunnels are clearly visible at the moment, and their little piles of droppings by the water’s edge are clear signs that they too have survived another winter. We reintroduced them on the farm two years ago, and because we have dug 24 ponds, they are thriving. Nothing ostentatious mind you, but they are there, quietly going about their business.

Nick

The Bevis Trust

It’s taken several years to get this far with the Bevis Trust. Finally we have created a ‘starter pack’ of Trustees and registered a Not for Profit Company and opened a bank account for the Company (which took a mere three months). What has taken the time has been developing the vision of where we want to go. Over the past 35 years we have built the farm up from zero, buying in land whenever we had the chance and could afford it. None of our children are interested in carrying on with the farm. My eldest son Jamie is now dairy farming in New Zealand and the others have no wish to run what is now 290 acres or so in west Wales. At the same time we have done a lot of work on the farm over the years and you can read about some of this on the website. Finally we reached a point where we asked the question, when making our Wills: ‘What is more important – people or the land?’

So, after making some provision for our children, we decided that the future of the land was important to us, and that we did not want to see the farm sold off and turned into a housing estate. But who would look after it when we are dead? The solution was to bequeath everything to a not for profit Company and create a Board of Trustees. Being impatient people, we couldn’t wait to die, so we have formed the Company while we are still alive and able to shape it along the lines we envisaged.

But the Bevis Trust is not just about land. Bevis was a boy in a story by Richard Jefferies. Bevis grew up on a farm in Wiltshire near where I too grew up a hundred years later. It tells how Bevis and his friend Mark had adventures together out on the farms, and gradually became more self-reliant, and more aware of nature as they grew up. The story is related against a backdrop of farming as it was then, the seasons unroll with their changing farm tasks and the labourers, gaffers and social routines. Much of it strikes a chord with me, growing up in a small village on the Wiltshire downs in the 1950s in shorts made of cut down trousers, bringing in the cows for hand milking and gawping at a new-fangled tractor farting its way up the lane. The sawmill was an adventure then, with its big long drive belt (no health and safety!) and smell of fresh sawn oak. The hurdler used to bang his hazel rods into an old beam to get his hurdle started. Rabbits were still a pest, myxie had yet to decimate them, and brass snares, purse nets, ferrets and long dogs were in common use to wage war. Threshing time was an adventure, with string tied round long trousers to stop rats going up your legs and hilarious shrieking as we tried to nobble the fleeing rats as we got down to the base of the ricks. I still remember seeing my first fox when we were gleaning potatoes.

The farming year dominated everything, as it still does, but now it seems that farming has become rather divorced from wildlife, and wildlife enthusiasts have little understanding of farming. I’ve seen this more and more in the last two or three decades, and nothing illustrates it better than the debacle we have with badgers and bovine Tb. Therefore my wife Barbro and I resolved that the Bevis Trust would work to show how practical farming can operate side by side with wildlife, and give people a chance to come and learn about it, bringing different views together. The average income of a Welsh farmer in 2016 is predicted to be £13,000. Average age about 62. About 25% don’t have computers, because a lot of us cannot get broadband. You’d be better off being a waiter! And how many occupations require you to put the best part of a million pounds on the table to pay for your workplace? With bottled milk selling at 75% of the price of bottled water, farming is surely a mug’s game. Pushed to these limits, few farmers can afford the luxury of even thinking about wildlife.

Now the Bevis Trust has finally become an entity and I will tell you more about our adventures in another blog. All the best stories should leave you in suspense…

Nick.