- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
So Cuddly Chris Packham thinks we should replant the ‘180,000 miles of hedgerows destroyed since 1960’. Apparently he thinks a lot of other things, some of which are perfectly reasonable, but much of it woefully ignorant fantasy. I’m not going to dispute the figure, it may be spot on for all I know- let’s assume it’s right.
If a hedge is 6’ wide, and while you can barely make them narrower it’s all too easy in the real world for them to spread further- a single mile of hedge has a footprint of something over two thirds of an acre. So just the actual footprint of Chris’ fantasy hedge is around 121,500 acres. Now working on the reasonable assumption that most of the hedges pulled out were removed on ploughable land, as tractors replaced heavy horses –and I sometimes wonder if Chris and his chums think farmers removed hedges because they hated wildlife, rather than it simply being expedient as farming methods evolved- it follows that most of the ground lying under those absent hedge lines is now in tillage. The grain crops- or equivalent- we’re talking about forfeiting would be in the region of a third of a million tonnes, which is, well, quite a lot.
But regrettably this isn’t the half of it. You see, a vibrant hedge will draw nutrients from several feet out into the crop, while its shade also saps growth and slows ripening. And it’s a reckless driver who works too tight to the edge anyway. There’s also bunnies to consider, as wherever they’re grubbing their little burrows in the hedge, they’re also out hopping around night-time eating crops. They, at least, can be held at bay by a couple of swarthy lads with a few long nets and a bitey ferret….but still. I would hazard a guess that you ought to realistically double the forfeited area one way and another. So, we’re idly talking about something in the order of 600,000 tonnes of cereal crop- or the equivalent in whatever else farmer Giles might be growing. Currently that’s circa £90 million per annum.
I’m going to stop here for a moment. I want to be very clear, I love the patchwork of field boundaries across the countryside –although my home patch is mostly drystone walls. I love the shelter they give livestock, I love the idea that they’re wildlife havens in an urbanising world. I detest seeing them excessively grubbed out, or more insidiously continually flailed down stupidly tight. Even on an all-arable farm, why would you need fields miles across? My brief experiences of arable work many moons ago –combining in Sweden and driving a grain truck on the Canadian prairie since you ask- found me struggling to stay awake aiming into the far distance. And then, in livestock areas, there’s scant benefit from making fields much bigger, and the shelter certainly has a value. As I alluded, we’ve had to rationalise as the millennia long reign of the working horse came to a close, but that’s no reason to tear the place to shreds. Anyway, the tide turned 20 years ago, and almost no hedges are removed now- except by urban sprawl- while many miles of new hedge are planted. Sadly this detail isn’t something ‘celebrity naturalists’ want to hear.
Returning to Chris Packham’s sound bite manifesto then – and I’m taking this one element to pieces to illustrate how misguided, divisive and unrealistic a lot of it is- none of us can afford to traditionally steep and layer these hedges anymore. Some of us try, and there are barely adequate grants, but they don’t actually stipulate that the repaired hedge need be properly stock-proof, which makes a nonsense of the whole idea. No, although I love steeping hedges, and can make a properly sheep proof fence of one given the time, farm produce is worth too little, and labour costs are too high. So if they need to be stockproof, we mostly double fence them, and then trim them mechanically. If just a third of Chris’ mythical mileage is to be in livestock areas, that’ll be another 120,000 miles of fences put up costing £900 million, with an ongoing annual repair and replacement bill of circa £60 million.
I just phoned my contractor, and the annual cost of mechanically trimming a mile of straightforward hedge is something in the order of £200.
So that’s £360 million annually, bringing the total after establishment up to half a billion a year, and being reliant 600,000 tonnes of food additionally imported from….well, somewhere where hedges mightn’t be so important.
It’s a naïve fantasy, insulting hypocritical idealistic nonsense, and should- respectfully- be treated as such.
My hedge-trimming contractor meanwhile is quite excited by the concept!
If a hedge is 6’ wide, and while you can barely make them narrower it’s all too easy in the real world for them to spread further- a single mile of hedge has a footprint of something over two thirds of an acre. So just the actual footprint of Chris’ fantasy hedge is around 121,500 acres. Now working on the reasonable assumption that most of the hedges pulled out were removed on ploughable land, as tractors replaced heavy horses –and I sometimes wonder if Chris and his chums think farmers removed hedges because they hated wildlife, rather than it simply being expedient as farming methods evolved- it follows that most of the ground lying under those absent hedge lines is now in tillage. The grain crops- or equivalent- we’re talking about forfeiting would be in the region of a third of a million tonnes, which is, well, quite a lot.
But regrettably this isn’t the half of it. You see, a vibrant hedge will draw nutrients from several feet out into the crop, while its shade also saps growth and slows ripening. And it’s a reckless driver who works too tight to the edge anyway. There’s also bunnies to consider, as wherever they’re grubbing their little burrows in the hedge, they’re also out hopping around night-time eating crops. They, at least, can be held at bay by a couple of swarthy lads with a few long nets and a bitey ferret….but still. I would hazard a guess that you ought to realistically double the forfeited area one way and another. So, we’re idly talking about something in the order of 600,000 tonnes of cereal crop- or the equivalent in whatever else farmer Giles might be growing. Currently that’s circa £90 million per annum.
I’m going to stop here for a moment. I want to be very clear, I love the patchwork of field boundaries across the countryside –although my home patch is mostly drystone walls. I love the shelter they give livestock, I love the idea that they’re wildlife havens in an urbanising world. I detest seeing them excessively grubbed out, or more insidiously continually flailed down stupidly tight. Even on an all-arable farm, why would you need fields miles across? My brief experiences of arable work many moons ago –combining in Sweden and driving a grain truck on the Canadian prairie since you ask- found me struggling to stay awake aiming into the far distance. And then, in livestock areas, there’s scant benefit from making fields much bigger, and the shelter certainly has a value. As I alluded, we’ve had to rationalise as the millennia long reign of the working horse came to a close, but that’s no reason to tear the place to shreds. Anyway, the tide turned 20 years ago, and almost no hedges are removed now- except by urban sprawl- while many miles of new hedge are planted. Sadly this detail isn’t something ‘celebrity naturalists’ want to hear.
Returning to Chris Packham’s sound bite manifesto then – and I’m taking this one element to pieces to illustrate how misguided, divisive and unrealistic a lot of it is- none of us can afford to traditionally steep and layer these hedges anymore. Some of us try, and there are barely adequate grants, but they don’t actually stipulate that the repaired hedge need be properly stock-proof, which makes a nonsense of the whole idea. No, although I love steeping hedges, and can make a properly sheep proof fence of one given the time, farm produce is worth too little, and labour costs are too high. So if they need to be stockproof, we mostly double fence them, and then trim them mechanically. If just a third of Chris’ mythical mileage is to be in livestock areas, that’ll be another 120,000 miles of fences put up costing £900 million, with an ongoing annual repair and replacement bill of circa £60 million.
I just phoned my contractor, and the annual cost of mechanically trimming a mile of straightforward hedge is something in the order of £200.
So that’s £360 million annually, bringing the total after establishment up to half a billion a year, and being reliant 600,000 tonnes of food additionally imported from….well, somewhere where hedges mightn’t be so important.
It’s a naïve fantasy, insulting hypocritical idealistic nonsense, and should- respectfully- be treated as such.
My hedge-trimming contractor meanwhile is quite excited by the concept!
