Our lower fields become very waterlogged in winter. The main field is also now in a state of flux as we move away from the old broken drainage system to natural watercourses which will be more stable, lower maintenance, less environmentally disruptive and hopefully less prone to flooding. For this reason, although it’s not traditional, we’ve been keeping the cattle above the road on a small hill through the winter months. They have quite a large area (45 hectares) to roam in so they can forage across the hill and shelter from the weather.
I’ve been scratching my head for the last few weeks, though, as they have been sticking to one small patch which is now quite overgrazed, despite there being quite a bit to eat on the rest of the hill.
I’m certain it’s not the direction of the wind or the weather conditions. We can access the hill to feed them from one end or the other, so when they do occasionally go to the other areas (about one day out of every ten) I can see this on the sat nav and switch to feed them there. I’ve become convinced that it is our behaviour, rather than their instinct, that is keeping them in this area. They’ve become too habituated to being fed and don’t want to miss out, and we need to break this cycle.
The cattle’s habituation to feeding is akin to how government subsidies shape the behaviour of farmers and landowners. Unfortunately, the subsidies don’t respond to the specific requirements of a piece of land or different ways of farming and administrative systems require standardisation. So, land use becomes about payments, as opposed to what works logically, or ecologically for either the landowner or the piece of land. Our old drainage ditches were probably put in because of the subsidies to increase yield after the Second World War. Since then, we’ve had the EU food mountains, ecological collapse and now a shift to carbon credits and incentives for good stewardship.
In Lochaline, concerns have been raised recently that conservation is at local people’s expense, particularly in relation to people’s views being blocked by trees and green areas becoming scrubbier. I would hope there are few people who begrudge anyone a nice view, or an area of cut grass for kids to play or to have picnics. (The first thing we did on our croft was cut back the 10ft brambles and fuchsias surrounding the house and replace them with a lawn.)
I wonder whether the perception that conservation comes at ordinary people’s expense relates instead to a justified insecurity about who will benefit. The structure of carbon credit schemes and nature restoration funding, which tend to reward scale and the capacity to measure outcomes, are far harder for small landholders to access or for local communities to see direct benefit from (and as Micheal Foxley mentioned in last month’s De tha Doll aren’t available for tenanted crofters); standardised recruitment policies in conservation organisations often favour formal qualifications restricting who can apply; and structures of land ownership since the clearances mean most people have very little control over the land that surrounds them. To me, just transition means breaking these cycles of habituation. Diversifying land ownership and therefore land management would be a good place to start.
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