Serious challenges are in store for those trying to fathom the accumulated complexities of farm payments and it’s best not to make the effort unless you stand to benefit personally. Impenetrable systems are bad for transparency bad for democratic accountability and good for those who set themselves to play the system. You just have to look at the opportunities well connected people have for avoiding tax.
We knew it was bad news for local people’s attempts to influence the course of Blacka’s management when we saw the decision had been taken to define it as farmland. Common Agricultural Policy subsidies and their various means of rewarding farmers for not quite ruining the land, landscape and general environment are high in bureaucracy and low in enforcement. So people can and do get away with a lot as long as they know how to fill in the forms. There’s only one honourable approach to these grants for wildlife land managers and that’s to leave them out of the equation.
Many people want the C.A.P. and farm subsidies reformed and some want the system done away with altogether. The environmental payments are justified by decision makers because they bribe farmers to desist from over exploitation and ensuring fewer of them dig out hedges, make huge monoculture fields and put short term profit before flood-causing soil erosion etc.
Most of us didn’t anticipate this would empower others with no remit to exploit the land to do just that simply in order to get entitlement to the same funds. That is what the conservation industry does. Instead of allowing land under its control to be its own self with minimal intervention it takes advantage of the system to garner gloops of dosh from the subsidies intended to constrain farmers. The effect is to seriously limit the capability of a grander landscape evolving with more inspiring views and wildlife.
The result of this is to totally skew the whole approach to the landscape especially the upland landscape. The minimal intervention which nature and the land craves for its immense benefit for a balanced wildlife is ditched in favour of more farm-style management which brings in the subsidy dosh that was originally supposed to be a bribe for farmers many of whom would otherwise be tempted to go all out for maximum cropping and stocking for a greater profit.
So that's why we get cows and sheep on Blacka. Not for conservation reasons but for the subsidies. Conservation grazing is in fact doing just a measured dose of naughtiness so you can get the same benefits as the prodigals when they rein in their worst potential excesses. But the most objectionable aspect of this is the dishonesty that goes along with it. The conservation wallahs put lots of their creative energies into justifying this interventionist approach trying to persuade the ingenuous public that their farming management is good for the land and for wildlife. The resulting phrasings are usually incredible often contortionist and sometimes frankly hilarious. Only the gullible would fall for the stuff which scarcely betters “..the dog ate my homework..” for desperation. Here's a sample, much laboured over and adapted over the years, some stretching credibility to the utmost for anyone who actually looks at what happens while others are just ridiculous. It comes from SWT's recent notice pinned up on Blacka. These are their 'benefits of cattle grazing':
Number five is new this year and wins the comedy award.
As usual the question you have to ask is how on earth did nature survive at all before man and especially office-manager-man came along and told it what to do?
A lot of this justification project revolves around their counterfeit hallowing of barren heath and moor landscapes because allowing wildlife friendly native trees to grow in the land brings in no subsidies. It's what nature does without any help. Disaster for the managers. So they wage war on the natural vegetation while verbally and physically attacking it as unfavourable, as if it’s a flowerbed besieged with weeds. All the time these utterly corrupted managers claim they are managing 'wild land' or 'wilderness'. The rational world is turned on its head.
Out of interest the total sum paid to Sheffield Wildlife Trust from C.A.P. payments for 2011 was just short of £17,000. In 2012 it had climbed to over £111, 000. Source of information via this search.
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