Open letter to DEFRA about scrub mosaic creation and maintenance
You asked me to email about SCR1, so here goes, I feel a bit like I should say sorry before I start as I am going to nitpick! Please excuse any typos or spelling mistakes. Dyslexia sucks.
Firstly, this is a land abandonment payment.
By which I mean it pays a landowner more than the average farm rent per hectare to not farm it. All you’d need to do is plant a few areas of blackthorn or bramble and get rid of the pesky tenant farmer and their mud and grumbles, and you get more money. It’s easier than woodland creation (which pays more) but it leaves the land in a ‘recoverable’ state after five years and you get to be all ‘smug green’ in the pub if challenged by the locals about the land.
(Average rent per hectare in South West £211 in 2023 vs SCR1 payment of £588… https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65aa7fce698722000d37412c/average_rents_region_23jan24.csv)
It’s going to encourage a kind of half arsed bad rewilding, not help the good projects, and I wonder who advocated for it? Its optics are terrible.
It was made very clear to me at the Landscape Decisions conference at the Royal Society last year, that we have to layer land use, so food and nature (even if the food production is low) is better than just nature. We don’t have the luxury of a excess of land to play with.
Secondly, and more importantly, it’s not going to create anything like a species rich mixed mosaic scrub habitat. It, in fact, poses a risk of damaging biodiversity instead of helping it in some places because, if by any small miracle, somewhere already has dung beetles or patches of good rich pasture five years of no grazing or cutting will kill them off quite nicely.
A truly diverse scrub habitat takes a long time to establish, and it’s a dynamic process rather than a static land use. As a wild habitat it is created by herbivores interacting with the wood edge, or in a savannah style setting. The plants responding to the varied pressures applied by growing in distinct ways, holly leaves responding to browsing by becoming prickly, hawthorn becoming not a lollipop shaped tree but a dense impenetrable bush with a tree growing out above it. Bird safety zones. The saying ‘the torn is the mother of the oak’ is true, but it’s also the mother to a lot of prey species too.
Now this natural approach takes ages, but it can be given a head start and an approximation can be created fairly easily, but not without grazing.
The main issue is not creating the scrub, that can be planted into any trashed field, with protection from deer where the numbers are high if needed, and will get growing, it’s the mosaic part. The flowering plants part. That’s where the idea falls apart.
Take a bog standard ryegrass and clover lay, no real hedges or scrub to expand, just a field.
Now remove the grazing, and add in some planted blackthorn or hawthorn, put some protecting guards around them and sit back and wait. What will happen?
Some scrub for sure but what else?
Long grass. That’s what will happen. Lots of long grass, which is great for the voles but not the flowering plants that the bees, butterflies and beetles need. They will be shaded out if they even have a seed source in that soil. The thuggish grasses there already will just take over. After three years they may die back a bit, but it’s not a certainty. You may get buttercups and thistles, or docks, but SCR1 allows you to use herbicide on them so, let’s say you are a conventional kind of farmer, you’ll spray them to stop them spreading.
So, you end up with places for the birds to live, but very little insect life to feed the birds. Very little seed to feed them either. Very little pollen for the bees, and no dung beetles (if there were any to start with) and no flies (which abound in every conventional farm with livestock) and you’ll end up with a static rather than dynamic landscape. The scrub plants will go leggy without the browsing, and not provide decent shelter pretty fast as well.
The farmer won’t even have a place to walk that is buzzing with life, they’ll feel cheated and it may confirm their bias that those ecologists know nothing, after all there were more birds in that old pasture their neighbour grazes than in this rank grass mess.
With no cutting and no grazing and deer control the sward length, that needs to be variable, becomes uniform. With no reseed how do you get the missing plants into the sward?
So. You’ll get small scrub trees in the five years but otherwise you will have set people up to fail.
You can see why I am not happy!
Now, having pointed out all the issues I shall say how I would create bird/bee/beetle/bat habitat with added fungi and fast on such land.
So we need this land to go from monoculture arable, or basic grass lay to a place (some) birds can thrive, lots of plants can be feeding lots of insects and the soil improves. We also need to keep farmers on the land, pay the rent and produce food. And do it in 5 years.
First, get brash heaps or dead hedges made across it. Allow the farmer to use off its from any suitable garden waste, encourage them to build big heaps where it’s going to work long term. Where they can get a tractor past, where the wind blows strongest across the field. Where it’s damp, or very compacted. Plant scrub species inside these heaps of wood. Or if it’s thorns around the outside of them.
So you instantly have bird habitat. Dead wood with insects to feed them and fungi to feed the soil.
Next you see what plants you have. How bad is it? Do you need to reseed? If so, do. Herbal lay it right up, or use green hay, or get a mix from the hippies over the hill of random seeds they gathered. Whatever you need to get the flowers growing. (You could do this before the piles of sticks are built.)
Only let herbicides be used after serious discussion. Not just for some docks or thistles.
Then graze it. With cows OR sheep. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how long they are in the field rather than what they are. Imagine a wolf is stalking them… only a day, maybe two, eat and leave. Then return. Then go again. Pulse across it.
Encourage no worming so dung beetles thrive. Graze in the winter with species rich hay to break up the sward. But only for a day or two at a time. A mob graze style of management if necessary.
If the deer are a big issue use electric fences or build scrub protection boxes (four posts and some rails or wire).
Next cut hay or silage around the scrub heaps. Not too close (don’t want to break the cutter on the brash or kill all the voles) but enough to remove the excess nutrients.
Then you will get what you want. A buzzing thriving mixed habitat.
On less ‘improved’ ground it’s easier. On rough land it’s simple. Let the folk above the moorland line do this and you’d make Dartmoor a lot happier.
And now the maintenance part SCR2.
Make the habitat and get £588.
Already have the habitat and get £238 pounds less a hectare AND get told what to do… even though you have the habitat already and did it without the financial incentive.
What if you’re using that scrubby pasture for the sheep in the autumn so you get waxcaps too? What if you over winter the rams on it? What if you roll out some hay for the cows when the weathers icy in the shelter of the scrub? What if you spread a little muck in there to feed the worms and thrushes? Then you get nothing. Just the wonder of a place that holds birds safe and where the bats hawk around the scruffy trees at dusk, mixing with the swallows and swifts, to feast on the dung beetles and moths rising out of the half eaten pasture. Just a place a shrike may come, or a flock of redwings.
Lovely as that is it’s not going to help pay the council tax is it.
So, finally, how to word SCR1 and SCR2 so you get the nature needed and don’t facilitate complete land abandonment.
SCR1 must not graze or cut the grassland in a way that means this action’s aim cannot reasonably be achieved
SCR2 must not Manage the area in a way that means this action’s aim cannot reasonably be achieved
That’s it. That’s all you have to do. (Along with upping the payment for SCR2, because those folk faced down bps rules to keep their scrub and should, in a fair world, get compensated for it!)
If you want to visit and see what I mean on the ground, please do. We may even manage a cream tea or cake. I can gather some other scruffy land farmers who know more than me to help get this working.
