Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
becoming national pastimes. The price of a small acreage of woodland, which a few years
ago was about half that of pasture land, has shot up and would now be higher than pasture
were it not for the fact that horseyculture has pushed the price of pasture up correspond-
ingly.
The move to bring existing neglected woodlands back into a state of management is to be
welcomed. An economy which rewards its urban élites and 'creative classes' handsomely,
and doesn't pay its landworkers properly, has to rely on voluntary labour. If there are people
with urban incomes who get more satisfaction from driving out to the countryside at week-
ends and hacking down brambles and rhododendron than they do from flying out to In-
donesia for a fortnight in the rainforest, then that is well and good. It is a bit of a cock-eyed
way of going about land management, but it is arguably better than letting land go derelict.
The planting of new areas of trees on grassland, however, is a different matter. It involves
a reversal of land use, and often it is not at all clear that this is carried out with any coherent
objective in mind. When villages and parishes were land-based communities there was a
logic in the way they laid out land uses according to the topography, fertility and distance
from the village, and much of this pattern still remains. The same concern is reflected by
modern permaculture designers in their advice to 'zone' different land-based activities ac-
cording to the amount of attention they require and other factors. It is unlikely that many
private landowners take such matters into account when they decide to reverse several hun-
dred years of history.
Take for example a certain village in Somerset where there are two areas called Broad
Mead and Little Mead. These were the meadows which served the village when it was more
communally operated before enclosure. In those days, copyholders, who rented small prop-
erties of ten acres or so, also received, with their property, the right to graze either 25 or 50
sheep on the commons. They would fold their animals on their lands for manure, bringing
them down what are now hollow lanes, gouged into the hillside by the passage of hooves.
Presumably they also had access to some of the meadow land, near the small river, other-
wise they would have had problems feeding their stock over winter.
Little Mead is now the name of a housing estate. Broad Mead is divided into a number
of fields, the majority of which still provide grazing or hay. But there is a move towards a
change of land use. Already two of the fields have been planted out with amenity wood-
land. Since the profits to be made from farming are low, it is understandable that their own-
ers should turn their field over to a crop which involves little maintenance, and provides a
green and pleasant land use. Just two fields out of a dozen or so do not in themselves con-
stitute a radical change, and they add texture and variety to the neighbouring landscape.
But the plantations show how far removed the dormitory villages of England are from
any notion of collective or strategic land management. Centuries ago somebody went to a
great deal of trouble to clear Broad Mead of trees, because the land was best suited for use
as a meadow: flat, fertile, well watered and close to the village, a place where you could
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