Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
who was having trouble acquiring permission for a residence on his holding. One of the ar-
guments advanced by the planners was that the area was traditionally a pastoral landscape.
But, as Andy pointed out, most of the barns in the locality that the planners had allowed
to be converted to luxury dwellings were threshing barns, with wide central doors known
as sails, because they were used to funnel the wind inside for drying and winnowing. He
showed me a 19th century tithe map identifying which fields were arable and which were
pasture, and over a third of them were arable. Andy's view was that not all the fields would
have been cultivated at any one time, but they would have been folded into a convertible
husbandry rotation.
When urged to diversify, the fossil fuel dependent barley barons of East Anglia habitu-
ally squeal that their 'four horse clay' is unsuitable for livestock, and that yields of corn in
the west will never match those they achieve in the east. But their clay is no heavier than
some I know of on dairy farms in Somerset. And the fact that yields of wheat from the
UK's arable lands are higher than in any other country in the world except Belgium does
not prevent us from importing grain and soya beans from low yielding lands in the Amer-
icas, so perhaps we should not be over concerned. It is also worth noticing that the country
with the highest yield in oats - a remarkable 7.3 tonnes per hectare - is Ireland; that hilly
Switzerland and boggy Ireland both have higher barley yields than the UK; and that the
only grain in which the UK excels above every other country is rye, so perhaps we should
grow more of that.
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There is no question that many pastoral areas like the Welsh borders or Devon can grow
arable crops, because they have done so before. But there are rougher, less populated areas
where nothing other than perhaps lazybed potatoes have been grown for as long as any-
one can remember. It would be foolish to imagine that grain cultivation can or should be
imposed upon every scrap of moorland, heath or peat bog, and it would be environment-
ally undesirable to do so. But there are few regions which do not have some areas appro-
priate for arable; even the extremities of Scotland hosts crofts, and there is nothing wrong
with potatoes. Moreover, wherever there are livestock there is the opportunity to garner and
concentrate fertility from the wider environment, and an overpopulated island striving for
self-reliance can ill afford to waste the opportunity that livestock present to improve poor
quality soils.
To some people 'improvement' in regard to land is a dirty word. It is the forerunner
of that most contentious of modern terms, 'development'. Improvement is the last thing
that conservationists want to see happening to precious remnants of biodiverse meadow or
heathland. And those of us who bear the scars of enclosure on our ideological coat of arms
remember that our ancestors were thrown off their land and herded into cities by those who
considered it their God-given right, for the purposes of improvement, to depopulate fens
and steal commons.
