James Reebanks. Famed author. Farmer of sheep on the tree denuded hillsides of the Lake District. Environmentalist:
Livestock, if well managed, repair soil, trample or eat crop residues and waste, provide fertiliser and control weeds. It means our uplands becoming patchworks of native habitats – meadows and pastures, woodland and bogs – and our lowlands working as rotational mosaics of fields.
Funny that, isn’t it? How his environmental prescription involves farming sheep on the tree denuded hillsides of the Lake District.
In fairness if a particular landscape was produced with pre-Victorian (I want to get the pun in by saying Georgian but perhaps not) then continuing said pre-Victorian farming and methods will preserve the landscape.
We have to ask if we would prefer woodlands. With wolves? Sure. But perhaps ramblers are more popular than bears.
Having been on the Lakeland fells more often than I care to remember, it’s pretty obvious that sheep are an agent of erosion, and the farmers there don’t care a flying feck about anything other than making a living. The average sheep has a small sign on its head saying ‘A few £’ in a similar way that University students walk around with a big sign on their heads (visible to Vice Chancellors and their entourages) saying ‘a lot of £’.
SMFS – I think the habitats were already established by the early middle ages when export levies on wool were the crown’s single largest source of revenue.
In recent times farm subsidies have done much to encourage the ploughing up of downland (tough on the orchids and fritillaries) and the despoilation of ancient landscapes in order to produce arable crops with lashings of P₂O₅ and other goodies.
Wasn’t England denuded of it’s trees to build all the ships needed to keep control of it’s empire.
The general view of the farming industry (the rank and file not the usual nobs in the NFU) is that Reebanks is a twat who can’t make money from farming so sells books about it instead.
To a good approximation the “native habitats” of Britain are wildwood from coast to coast, with exceptions for land above (say) 1400′, a few wind-battered cliffs by the shore, the tundra of the Western Isles, and the bogs of Caithness.
‘… our uplands becoming patchworks of native habitats – meadows and pastures, woodland and bogs…’
Nothing to do with well managed anything, it’s what is already there. It is the natural landscape of uplands and moors due to the geology left behind when the ice retreated – rocky substrate with thin, poor topsoil – making it unsuitable for growing anything but sheep and goats evolved to survive on weeds, scrub, lichen, thistles and the like which thrive on this type of ground.
Sheep in the hills and dales aren’t ‘well managed’, they roam free, rounded up by one man and his dog now and then for dipping, shearing and slaughter.
SMFS: If God had meant us to be eaten by wolves, He wouldn’t have invented the AK 47.