Conservation Grazing

It must be a great comfort to those who don't want cattle on Blacka Moor to be told that what's happening is called "conservation grazing". It makes it all seem right doesn't it? Or does it?


Certain theories that seem to be a good idea at the time have something of a lifespan. They're flavour of the month or maybe the decade before going out of fashion because it takes that long to sink in among the practitioners that there are snags or something more important is being disregarded. But for a while everybody sings from the same hymn sheet telling the general public how really, really special and important it is. These days you can't listen to a countryside programme on the radio or see a TV snippet with that Craven man without somebody telling you that absolutely all of our countryside must be managed and management means putting sheep and cattle all over every square yard of it - or sure as sure doom and disaster will strike. There are of course sceptics of this approach but do you ever hear from them ? It seems they don't get heard or just keep quiet....

Except for Mark Fisher whose writings offer a vigorous and detailed critique of all this nonsense. Another great article from him on this very subject has newly appeared on his website. It's called The Craze for Conservation Grazing and reminds us that there is still some independent thinking around prepared to challenge blind orthodoxy.

The conservation grazers recently brought back to the moor on Blacka continue to walk the paths decorating them in the only way they know and eating the grass but largely ignoring the bracken and the heather.


The sheep are certainly not there because they look nice which is a bit odd when you consider that Blacka is there principally for the benefit of the people who visit it not for farming interests. I've been to many places where the sheep just look better than here ...

- stronger, healthier and without large dye blotches all over them, or even numbers.

And this temporary aluminium structure is prominently visible for many a mile as the only non-natural item across a large swathe of this special landscape.

A couple of quotes from Mark Fisher's article both very apposite to Blacka Moor:

It is a strange world where Natural England can routinely use a farming subsidy to re-instate the farming pressure of cattle grazing on the landscape, when that farming subsidy, Higher Level Stewardship (HLS), is supposedly about mitigating the effects of farming.

and

It is hard for local people to challenge this slavish orthodoxy, and when they do they are usually brushed aside. But what I constantly hear is that there is no monitoring of the impact of grazing, and little evident success in these “restoration” projects compared to what the “experts” said would happen.

Amen to that.