More Cattle Grazing Controversy

The local Friends group at Loxley and Wadsley Common have been fighting Sheffield City Council’s plans to put cows on the common plus fencing. This is the plan of Sheffield’s Parks and Countryside’s Ranger Service which has fallen in behind the dreary conservation industry orthodoxy that would have every available bit of land designated as farmland. Money of course is at the root of it all and the FAQ’s on the P&C Ranger’s website denying this only serves to fuel the suspicion. We had this with SWT too. The argument is that manual control cannot work because it’s too expensive so farm animals need to be brought in. That designates as farmland and farmland automatically qualifies for grants on several levels. So the denial by P&C is disingenuous. SWT did a calculation in front of our faces years ago when people suggested manual management but it was based on a ridiculous over estimate of the costs of an onsite employee. This idea of making cows do the work has several implications. One of these is that there’s an understanding within the plan that you know exactly what you want the place to look like and an assumption that the cattle will do just what you want and no more. Experience on Blacka affirms that this is plain twaddle. Cattle do what they do in fields up and down the country: they graze and chew and excrete and leave land looking like rough boring grassland unfit for anything but for cattle to graze on. I learned that in the far away post war years when we tried to play cricket between the cow pats in the local field. You can experience it in a similar way today when you try to find a picnic spot on Thistle Hill.

The other key implication gives the lie to P&C’s FAQ

Is the motive to change the management purely financial?

No, the motive here is to manage the site for its ecological value and to sustain this for our future generations. Any grants from managing the land in this way would only be for further improvements to the site.

The word to watch here is ‘purely’. They get away with it because they don’t say ‘largely’ or ‘mostly’; they are well practiced in this kind of guile. In fact the idea of the grazing is that the cows do the work and that means you don’t pay people to do things. That brings in money in two ways. The first is the Single Farm Payment from Rural Payments Agency (RPA) which hands out the huge farm subsidy budgets from the EEC’s CAP. The second is from Higher Level Stewardship paid through Natural England. Worth over £100.000. It is further disingenuous to state that the grants would only be used for improvements. Experience at Blacka suggests that the bulk of this goes on managers costs and that much of the ‘improvement’ that is done is no improvement at all and often done in a very haphazard sort of way with little if any benefit to the site by people whose heart is not in what they are doing and show little understanding; not a lot different to the cows in fact.

Anyway at a public meeting last week at Wadsley Church there was a 2 to 1 majority against the plan to put cattle on the common and the Rangers and managers went off saying it’s councillors who’ll decide and they won’t be bound by the views of the people. I’ve suggested that councillors who may decide at the Northern Community Assembly on 17^th October should be reminded that it will be Local Democracy Week and the will of the people should prevail.

Custodians

There’s a lot of tosh spoken by representatives of the farming industry about farmers being custodians of countryside and guardians of the beauty of the landscape and that it’s their grazing of livestock that means we have lovely countryside. It just doesn’t bear looking into. That doesn’t stop it being repeated time and again on media programmes such as Countryfile and Farming Today. Such attractiveness as they might be referring to is down to the general shapes and patterns of the fields and in the smaller wilder patches of ungrazed land just over the fences and old walls where weeds and wild flowers grow because livestock can’t reach them and within the copses and water margins which are also out of reach of the cattle and the hedges which have minimal intervention. The grazed areas are uninteresting in themselves and mostly very boring indeed. This is mainly because the livestock have been intensively bred over many generations to eat colossal amounts of vegetation to create bulk and meat, leaving nothing worthwhile behind. As for custodians there are some pretty ugly farms around the countryside and everyone’s seen examples. Witness the plastic sheeting, the decaying farm machinery and the sad looking livestock daubed with identification dye.