Farming and conservation in the UK Peter Shaw EGSH10.795S: Conservation ecology URL.

Farming and conservation in the UK

Peter Shaw

EGSH10.795S: Conservation ecology

URL

Introduction It is easy to imagine that all land of conservation

interest must be wild, unmanaged. No! Most land in the UK has suffered massive

human interference. There is still plenty of conservation interest!

The dominant influence on the majority of the UK landscape has been the farmer.

There is a world of difference between the impacts of a subsistence farmer and modern intensive farming. Peasants are one of our most endangered species!

Aims for today:

To introduce some endangered farmland species, and identify their management needs.

To contrast modern farming with the traditional version.

To explore the impacts of EU policy decisions.

Traditional farming may sound like a conservation idyll. Please remember that any conservation benefit it carried was wholly incidental!

Neolithic man cleared large areas of forest. Medieval men hunted bears, wolves, wild boar and beavers to extinction.

It just so happened that traditional farming imposed a continuous low intensity management regime for long periods of time (>1000 years in many places). Consistency in management allows specialist spp. to thrive.

Arable Grasslands. We must distinguish between meadows and pastures. Meadows are used to produce winter fodder (once

hay, now mainly silage). During spring and early summer animals are kept off meadows, and at the height of summer the meadow is cut.

Pastures is simply grazed (intermittently) all year. This affects the types of plants which develop:

meadows contain many spring-flowering spp, while pastures contain grasses + rosette plants.

Hay, straw and silage Straw is outside the scope of today: The coarse stems of

cereals (wheat etc). Hay has to be cut when the plants have hardened, and in

sunny weather (late June or July). It is dried, and kept for winter food.

Silage is fermented hay, so can be cut in any weather, and much earlier in the season (May vs July). This has implications for conservation of some birds that were formerly common, as we shall see.

After cutting, meadows continue to produce some growth which is grazed in late summer, autumn and winter.

Hay meadows I want to explore the decline of haymeadows, as an

example of the effects of agricultural intensification.

The traditional meadow management regime is called the lammas meadow, in which the land was grazed from lammas day (12/8) to Lady day (12/2), then left for hay.

The annual hay cut removed nutrients, slowly impoverishing the soil.

This proved to be a very stable regime, and selected for plants which flowered in spring on low-fertility soils.

The definitive hay meadow plant is the snakes head fritillary Fritillaria meleagris.

Always a plant of damp meadows in the Thames valley, it is now down to a handful of sites - best known being in Magdelen college Oxford. Other big colonies are in Wiltshire.

This lily is short-lived, and needs the combination of an undisturbed spring (to flower and seed), and cattle trampling in autumn (for seed germination).

The green winged orchid Orchis morio (now Anacamptis morio, but no books have changed yet).

This is said to be widespread and common - in 1950s floras. I have only seen it once in my life.

It is a species of old haymeadows, and is unable to survive under modern farming systems.

Unlike fritillaries, this plant was widespread - is just as good an indicator of haymeadows in Yorkshire as in Wiltshire.

The Green winged orchid, Orchis morio. (Newly renamedAnacamptis morio), a plant of unimproved meadows which vanishesfollowing chemical fertilisation.

Its name comes from thelateral lobes on its flowers, whichare green lined with purple.

Other hay meadow plants:

The hemi-parasite Hay rattle Rhinanthus minor.

Cuckoo flower Cardamine pratensis. Great Burnett Sanguisorba

officianalis. Globe flower Trollis europea (damp,

NW only).

Real history: Some meadows go back to the Domesday –

even earlier. The same mowing and grazing dates (give or take a little annual variation) – plenty of opportunity for specialists to colonise.

The few that remain are protected by strange old local bye-laws. Yarnton Meads meadow is divided into 4 sections, and each year farmers with permission to graze the meadow pick an ancient wooden token out of a bag, identifying the quarter of the meadow which they are allowed to harvest and subsequently graze.

The meadow arrangements are still decided by a court leet – a relic of a manorial court.

The definitive farmland conservation disaster – the corncrake.It depends on wet haymeadows. Schoolboy books in the 1940s made jokes about it – every country dweller knew it. Now it faces global extinction, as intensive farming practices spread.

1969 map.

In Orkney farmers are being paid by the RSPB to farm in a corncrake-friendly manner. They run traditional heaymeadows, cut them in late July (when chicks have hatched), and mow them in a corncrake-fiendly pattern.This has cost £500,000, and increased the Orkney corncrakes by 10 singing males.

Traditional mowingpattern, trapping animals and birds in the centre.

Corncrake-friendly:here the birds are pushed out of the field to safety.

How to “improve” a meadow:

1: Drain it if needed2: Plough it up3: seed with Lolium perenne and white clover4: fertilise heavily with NPK5: Claim your grant money for doing so.95% of neutral grasslands were lost between 1945 and 1990.

PS This will annihilate all biological interest. All specialist plant species lost, as are the fungi.Some fungal genera are notably sensitive to fertilisers: Hygrocybe, as is one you may know, the liberty cap Psilocybe semilanceata.

Psilocybe semilanceata – a saprophytic fungus of unimproved acid meadows.

How to make your own haymeadow:

This is now a common thing to do with conservation areas.

You need a large area (>0.5ha) of sunny land on a poor soil.

Prepare the site – weedkiller or stripping the topsoil. (nb this needs planning permission).

Seed the site with a commercial ‘conservation mix’. Often these are seeds taken from a traditional haymeadow (they make more money from seeds than the hay itself).

Normally you add a cornfield annuals mix – splashes of rapid colour, keeping down pernicious weeds.

You have to mow the site. At the same time, every year.

Having mown, you must also remove the hay. This removes nutrients from the soil, just as in traditional meadows.

In fact mowing is quick and fun – hire an Allen scythe, a hybrid between a self-propelled lawnmower and a hedge cutter.

The hard bit is removing the hay. I managed a meadow at CERL. It took me 45 minutes to mow the meadow. It took 7 of us a week to remove the hay. How long to impoverish the soil? In the region of 100 years, to make much

impact on most soils!

There used to be a diverse community of weeds that grew in cornfields.Their seeds were about the same size as corn seeds, so they were hard to remove.Modern seed cleaning techniques have effectively exterminated these species, which persist as garden plants.Sometimes buried seeds come up, eg when a cutting turns over old field soil.Some (eg corncockle, Agrostemma githago) have toxic seeds. Should we mourn this loss of biodiversity?

3 Once-common farmlandbirds that have declinedby >50% in the last decade: skylark, lapwing, tree sparrow, corn bunting

HedgesHedges help to define the character of the countryside, and act a valuable biological refuges. Birds, nest, mammals and insects shelter, woodland plants can persist (notably Dogs mercury) .1946 to 1976 120,000 miles were removed. Between 1984 and 1990 85,000 Km hedgerows were removed (=20% of what was left).This has reduced populations of many birds notably chaffinchs, sparrows and thrushes.

Hooper’s law It is often possible to age a hedge by reference to

historical documents – maps, parish registers etc. Many are remarkably old, reflecting ancient boundaries. (Boundaries generally last far longer than buildings, or most trees).

Work by Max Hooper of ITE showed that there was a good relationship between te species richness of hedges and their age: count the woody species in 25m, and that gives you an estimate of the hedge age in centuries. (Notice that this is a bit shaky for the first couple of centuries).

Near Oxford I found a hedge with 8 woody species in this distance – taking it to early Norman days.

CAP The biggest influence on our countryside is European farm

policy. This involves significant subsidies and a promotion of agrobusiness – industrial scale farms relying heavily on mechanisation and fertiliser/pesticide inputs.

CAP funds have destroyed low-intensity farming – inevitably followed by vanishing corncrakes. Irelands corncrakes halved in 5 years in 197s due to changes in EU subsidies.

The corncrake’s last significant GLOBAL population is in the peasant farms of eastern europe. These countries are queuing up to join the EU, and expect to receive funding to modernise their agriculture.

The definitive book on the subject is “The Killing of the countryside” by Graham Harvey, who is bitter at the way that EU money has largely destroyed our agricultural biodiversity.