Sheepwrecked - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 164

proportion of the topics produced for very young children concern this
industry. They tell a story of quaint and charming farmyards in which
one cow and her calf, one sheep and her lamb, one hen and her chicks,
one pony, one pig, one dog, one duck and one cat range freely. The farm-
ers have broad smiles and rosy cheeks and live in arcadian peace with the
animals they keep. Understandably, the issues of slaughter, butchery, con-
sumption, castration, tusking, separation, battery production, farrowing
crates, pesticides, waste disposal and other such industrial realities never
feature. Unintentionally these topics might implant, at the very onset of
consciousness, a deep, unquestioned faith in the virtue and beauty of the
farm economy and the importance of sustaining it, regardless of demand.
I spent several months pursuing an explanation for the subsidy rules,
and the way they are interpreted by national governments, during which
I was passed from one agency to another. After a long and exasperating
correspondence with her civil servants, I secured an audience with the
Welsh minister then in charge of rural affairs, Elin Jones. I began to
understand the nature of the problem when she put down her file of
notes on the table, and placed beside it a National Farmers' Union pen.
I was keen to discover why the Forestry Commission in Wales, a
branch of the Welsh government, had issued a blanket ban on tree
planting grants across almost all the uplands.* The explanation she
gave astonished me: she claimed that allowing trees to return to the
uplands would exacerbate global warming, as carbon dioxide would be
released from the soil. When I asked her officials how this statement
could be justified, they sent me two long scientific reports. I read them
and discovered that they said the opposite of what the minister and her
department had claimed. One of them revealed that it is not tree plant-
ing but overgrazing by sheep which has reduced the amount of carbon
in the soil in the Welsh uplands. † Even plantation forestry, which cre-
* In 2011 the Forestry Commission published a map showing where grants will be
issued for planting woodland. Almost all the upland areas of Wales, including most of
the Cambrian Mountains, were marked red, meaning that no planting would be sanc-
tioned there. 40
† 'This has had a detrimental effect on the ranker and peaty podzol soils, with
degraded areas containing significantly less carbon and nitrogen, means of 5% C and
0.4% N in comparison with 24-27% C and 1.1-1.4% N in intact heathland ecosys-
tems at the same site.' 41