In some cases we pay to support this hegemony and the monocultures it creates. Scores of billions of pounds of public money are spent each year to sustain the degradation of the natural world. In the United States, farm subsidies encourage the unvaried planting, across vast acreages, of corn. In Canada, subsidies for pulp and paper mills help to replace ancient forests with uniform plantations. Worse, perhaps, from the point of view of rewilding, is public spending which sustains monocultures in places which would otherwise be reclaimed by nature. This is what happens in the nation I am using as a case study of the monomania which blights many parts of the world. Here another monoculture has developed: a luxuriance, an infestation, a plague . . . of sheep.
I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep. It occupies many of my waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them. Perhaps I should clarify that statement. I hate not the animals themselves, which cannot be blamed for what they do, but their impact on both our ecology and our social history. Sheep are the primary reason–closely followed by grouse shooting and deer stalking–for the sad state of the British uplands. Partly as a result of their assaults, Wales now possesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of Europe.1 Their husbandry is the greatest obstacle to the rewilding I would like to see.
To identify the sheep as an agent of destruction is little short of blasphemy. In England and Wales the animal appears to possess full diplomatic immunity. Its role in the dispossession of many of the people who once worked on the land, as the commons were enclosed by landlords hoping to profit from the wool trade, is largely forgotten. This is what Thomas More wrote in Utopia, published in 1516:
Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt . . . leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house . . . the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all: by one means therefore or by other, either by hook or crook they must needs depart away.2
In Scotland, where the Clearances were more sudden and even more brutal than the enclosures in England and Wales, some people remain aware of the dispossession and impoverishment caused by sheep farming. But in Wales, though sheep have replaced people since the Cistercians established the Strata Florida abbey in the twelfth century, and though these enclosures were bravely resisted by riots and revolts such as Rhyfel y Sais Bach (the War of the Little Englishmen) in what is now Ceredigion in 1820,3 the white plague has become a symbol of nationhood, an emblem almost as sacred as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, ‘which taketh away the sin of the world’. I have come across a similar fetishization in Australia and New Zealand, North America, Norway, the Alps and the Carpathians.
There is a reason for this sanctification, but it is rapidly becoming outdated. While sheep were used in Wales as an instrument of enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the twentieth there was a partial but widespread process of land reform in the uplands. In the aftermath of David Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, which increased income tax and inheritance tax for the very rich, the big landowners in Wales, many of whom were English, began to sell off some of their property.4 They appear to have been less attached to their Welsh estates than to their English properties or their sporting land in Scotland, so these were shed first. Much of the land was bought by their tenants. Partly as a result, a smaller proportion of Wales than of England or Scotland remains in large estates. As the farmer Dafydd Morris-Jones, with whom I have discussed these issues at length, pointed out to me: ‘there is a great sense of national pride in the fact that the local population, after centuries of subservience, were able to reclaim “their” lands, and were no longer beholden to the lord of the manor’.
After the Second World War, through the 1947 Agriculture Act and the 1948 Agricultural Holdings Act, the tenant farmers who continued to rent their land gained security for life. For eighty or ninety years, until quite recently, much of the land in Wales was controlled by small farmers, most of whom raised sheep and cattle. (The cattle gradually disappeared, partly, it seems, as a result of the loss of the suckler cow premium–a European subsidy–in 2003.) During a period in which it faced mortal threats, they sustained the Welsh language and important elements of the national culture. Now the family farms are consolidating rapidly, into new agricultural estates. Despite the £3.6 billion a year British people spend ostensibly to sustain a viable farm economy, the National Farmers’ Union reports that ‘21% of upland farms are not expected to continue beyond the next 5 years.’5 The brief flowering of small-scale farming appears to be coming to an end.
Until the enclosures, Welsh farmers kept large numbers of cattle and goats in the uplands, and grew cereals, root crops and hay, even, in some places, on the tops of the hills. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the coming of the railways, much of this mixed farming had been replaced by sheep and cattle. The enclosures consolidated a grazing culture which still resonates through the place names, ballads and oral traditions of Wales. Farmers moved their flocks between hendre–literally ‘old town’ (the winter grazings surrounding the farmstead)–and hafod, rough huts in the summer pastures on the hills, some of which eventually became solid stone houses. (I have seen a similar system in Transylvania, where, in the late 1990s, shepherds who rode fine black horses still slept in summer houses, or stînas, of sticks and shakes in the mountains, milked their sheep and cows in the pastures, made a white cheese which they hung in bags from the rafters, drank plum brandy and sang around the fire at night.) Drovers walked the sheep along ancient tracks into England, driving the flocks from the Welsh uplands to markets as distant as Kent. Shepherds bred dogs and trained them to perform astonishing feats. Most of this has now gone, or persists–in the form of sheepdog trials–as little more than a ghost of the economy it once served.
Subsidies after the Second World War encouraged the farmers to increase the size of their flocks. Between 1950 and 1999, the number of sheep in Wales rose from 3.8 to 11.6 million. After headage payments–grants for every animal a farmer kept–were stopped in 2003, the population fell back again, to 8.2 million by 2010,6 which is still almost three sheep for every human being in Wales.
Since the Second World War, sheep have reduced what remained of the upland flora to stubble. In 6,000 years, domestic animals (alongside burning and clearing for crops and the cutting of trees for wood, bark and timber) transformed almost all the upland ecosystems of Britain from closed canopy forest to open forest, from open forest to scrub and from scrub to heath and long sward. In just sixty years, the greatly increased flocks in most of the upland areas of Britain completed the transformation: turning heath and prairie into something resembling a bowling green with contours.
Though sheep numbers have begun to decline, the impacts have not. More powerful machinery allows farmers to erase patches of scrub growing on land that was previously too steep to clear. This allows them to expand the area that qualifies for subsidies. In mid-Wales some farmers appear to retain a powerful compulsion, as they sometimes put it, to ‘tidy up’ the land. Ancient hawthorns and crab apples close to my home, often the last remnants of the last hedges on hills that are otherwise devoid of trees, are still being ripped up and burnt, for no agricultural reason that I can discern, except a desire for neatness and completion. From my kayak in Cardigan Bay I see a sight that Neolithic fishermen would have witnessed: towers of smoke rising from the hills as the farmers burn tracts of gorse and trees.
The UK’s National Ecos
ystem Assessment shows that the catastrophic decline in farmland birds in Wales has accelerated, despite the reduction in the number of sheep: in the six years after 2003 their abundance fell by 15 per cent.7 Curlews declined by 81 per cent in just thirteen years (from 1993) and lapwings by 77 per cent in only eleven years (from 1987). Golden plover, which have been the focus of intense conservation efforts, are now almost extinct: reduced to just thirty-six breeding pairs.8 Even in the most strictly protected places, only 7 per cent of the animal and plant species living in rivers are thriving.9
Overwhelmingly the reason is farming: grazing which prevents woods from regenerating and destroys the places where animals and plants might live, the grubbing up of trees, cutting and burning, pesticides and fertilizers which kill wildlife and pollute the watercourses. Almost all the rivers in Wales are in poor ecological condition, which is unsurprising when you discover that the nitrates and phosphates entering the water have risen sharply.10 Sheep dip residues have been found in almost 90 per cent of the places scientists have surveyed.11 Sheep dip is especially damaging, as it contains a powerful pesticide–cypermethrin–which can kill much of the invertebrate life in a river. Farming is cited as a reason for the decline of wildlife in Wales in 92 per cent of cases.12
A similar story can be told in almost all the uplands of Britain: Dart-moor, Exmoor, the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons, Snowdonia, the Shropshire Hills, the Peak District, the Pennines, the Forest of Bow-land, the Dales, the North York Moors, the Lake District, the Cheviots, the Southern Uplands. In fact the only wide tracts of upland Britain not grazed to the roots by sheep are those grazed to the roots by overstocked deer, in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Sheep farming in this country is a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to have noticed.
It grieves me to discover this. Hill farmers are trying only to survive, and theirs is a tough, thankless and precarious occupation. But when hills are heavily grazed–wherever in the world this takes place,–the other people of the nation pay a remarkably high ecological cost for this industry.
Those who defend heavy grazing–whether in Wales or Wyoming–sometimes argue that if sheep or other animals were removed from the hills, the ecological quality of the land would decline as trees and scrub replaced the grass. The National Farmers’ Union of Scotland warns that ‘fewer sheep . . . means undergrazing of traditional pastures, a loss of biodiversity, a return to bracken and brash and the potential for irreparable damage to Scotland’s beautiful landscape’.13 The president of the Farmers’ Union of Wales claims that reducing the number of sheep ‘has a severe detrimental impact on upland biodiversity’.14 This is incorrect. As I will show later, they appear to have confused a functioning ecosystem with a tidy one.
A more powerful argument is that upland grazing is essential for food production. This sounds likely, but is it really true? If Wales is a useful case study, perhaps not. Just over three-quarters of the area of Wales is devoted to livestock farming,*1 largely to produce meat.†2 But, by value, Wales imports seven times as much meat as it exports.18 This remarkable fact suggests an astonishing failure of productivity.
That is not quite the end of the issue. Deep vegetation on the hills absorbs rain when it falls, and releases it gradually, delivering a steady supply of water to the lowlands. When trees and shrubs are removed, the rain flashes off the hills, causing floods downstream. Sheep also compact the topsoil, reducing its permeability, which ensures that still less water is absorbed. Drainage systems dug in the pastures accelerate these effects. When the floods abate, water levels fall rapidly. Upland grazing contributes to a cycle of flood and drought.
The results can be seen in the record of floods in the River Wye across the seventy years beginning in 1936.19 The Wye rises on Pumlumon in the Cambrian Mountains. In this period the number of floods each year has roughly tripled. Yet there has been no commensurate rise in rainfall.20 Two things have changed. The first is that, as I have mentioned before, until the late 1990s the authorities dragged woody debris out of the upper reaches of this river, hastening the flow of water to the flooding zones. The second is that, as sheep numbers have risen, grazing in the watershed has intensified. Environmentalists have tended to blame all increased flooding on climate change. It is rapidly becoming a major factor, but until recently that was not the case. The land’s reduced ability to absorb the water that falls on it appears to have been more important.
The rivers which drain the Welsh uplands, the Severn and Wye in particular, flow, when they reach the lowlands, through some of the most productive parts of Britain, where the soil is fertile enough to grow fruit and vegetables as well as cereal crops. Many of the farms here depend on irrigation. Many lose crops and opportunities when the land floods. It is not easy to estimate how much potential food production might be lost in such places as a result of the increased volatility of the rivers that pass through them, and I can find no research which attempts to do so. But, given the remarkably low output in the upland areas of Britain, it is within the range of possibility that hill farming creates a net loss of food. There must be few industries in which such extensive environmental damage supports such small gains and so few people.
Grazing is one of the least productive uses to which the hills could be put. Despite the vast area it occupies and the subsidies it receives, farming in Wales contributes just over £400 million to the economy.21 Walking, with much lower environmental impacts, produces over £500 million, and ‘wildlife-based activity’ generates £1,900 million.*3 22 The National Ecosystem Assessment shows that, across most of the uplands of Wales, switching from farming to multi-purpose woodland would produce an economic gain.23 In other words, the current model of farming, far from being essential to the rural economy, appears to drag it down. The barren British uplands are a waste in two senses of the word.
All this would be less of our business if we were not paying for it. Hill farming is entirely dependent on subsidies provided by taxpayers. In Wales, the average subsidy for sheep farms on the hills is £53,000. Average net farm income is £33,000.24 The contribution the farmer makes to his income by raising sheep and cattle, in other words, is minus £20,000.
Farm subsidies cost the United Kingdom £3.6 billion a year. They consume 43 per cent of the European budget: €55 billion, or £47 billion.25 The British government estimates that the Common Agricultural Policy stings every household in the UK for £245 a year.26 That is equivalent to five weeks of food for the average household,27 or slightly less than it lays down in the form of savings and investments every year (£296).28 Using our money to subsidize private business is a questionable policy at any time. When important public services are being cut for want of cash, it is even harder to justify.
What do we receive in return for this generosity? The Common Agricultural Policy raises the price of feed, chemicals and machinery, helping to drive the smaller farmers out of business. It raises the price of land, which excludes young people who want to become farmers, and contributes to the rising price of food. This vast expenditure of public funds supports remarkably few people: in the whole of Wales there are just 16,000 full-time and 28,000 part-time farmers.29 But above all it pays for ecological destruction.
This is not an accident of policy. The rules are quite specific. They are laid down in a European code with the Orwellian title of ‘Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition’. Among the compulsory standards it sets is ‘avoiding the encroachment of unwanted vegetation on agricultural land’.30 What this means is that if farmers want their money they must stop wild plants from returning.*4 They do not have to produce anything, to keep animals or to grow crops there; they merely have to prevent more than a handful of trees or shrubs from surviving there, which they can do by towing cutting gear over the land.
The infamous ‘fifty trees’ guideline ensures that pastures containing more than fi
fty trees per hectare are not eligible for funding. A survey by the Grasslands Trust found that this rule excludes farm habitats of great value to wildlife, such as the wooded meadows of Sweden, the limestone pavements of Estonia and the browsed scrubland of Corsica.31 In Germany, pastures are disqualified from subsidies by the presence of small areas of reeds. In Bulgaria, the existence of a single stem of dog rose has rendered land ineligible. In Scotland farmers have been told that yellow flag irises, which for centuries have gilded the fields of the west coast, could be classed as ‘encroaching vegetation’, invalidating their subsidy claims. The government of Northern Ireland has been fined £64 million for (among other such offences) giving subsidy money to farms whose traditional hedgerows are too wide.32 The effect of these rules has been to promote the frenzied clearance of habitats. The system could scarcely have been better designed to ensure that farmers seek out the remaining corners of land where wildlife still resides, and destroy them.
A farmer can graze his land to the roots, run his sheep in the woods, grub up the last lone trees, poison the rivers and still get his money. Some of the farms close to where I live do all of those things and never have their grants stopped. But one thing he is not allowed to do is what these rules call ‘land abandonment’, and what I call rewilding. The European Commission, without producing any evidence, insists that ‘land abandonment in less advantageous areas would have negative environmental consequences’.33
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