Bog Myrtle & Peat

A piece of land near here was sold in the autumn. It went to a local farmer, and that was a relief because almost nothing is bought by local people now. It must’ve been too small or awkward to attract the major investors; the bankers and investment fund managers from Austria and Denmark. So in some ways this land was rescued from that offshoring, but diggers came in the spring and did comparable harm to the old place. It might be owned by a local, but now it’s been carved up and drained for cattle. Tall steel gates have been placed across the public footpaths which lead in from the town, and there’s a sense of sealing off. For all the time I’ve spent complaining about absent owners, this harm’s being done by a man who’s all too present. 

For fifty years, this land lay in a state of dozy underuse. A beard of trees emerged around the fringes, and exciting new reedbeds expanded into the pasture as the ditches failed. All of this is now being undone. Great screeds of scrub have been dug out and upended over the last few months; gone is the whinn and the hawthorn trees, and I suppose the heaps will burn when they’re dry. There used to be some elm trees in there, some of only a few in the parish. I’m glad I took seed from those trees when I did, because now they’re gone too. I have a tray of elm seedlings, but that’s hardly a fair exchange for the loss and the sight of a spotted flycatcher sitting blinking on the high tops of a splintered stump as if he’d just survived a shelling.

All this work is done for cattle and the sake of tidiness, but it’s useful to observe the fallout over the last few weeks of hot weather. The man’s cows have almost no shade now. They lie in the black block-shadow of the new steel gate. They attempt to enter a handful of hazardously ruined buildings, which, if they were my cows, would make me very anxious. They’re stuck in broad daylight, and the only relief comes towards the ends of each day when the sun sinks low enough to cast an almost useless shadow from the heaps of crushed-up timber. It’s all such self-defeating work; fifty years of free-agency and natural slackness uprooted for no obvious improvement. 

My world’s alive with modern words like silvopasture and agroforestry. There are so many potential benefits to managing cattle beneath tree cover, but shade is the most abundantly obvious pay-off. Give the cows somewhere to lie when it’s hot, and they’ll take it every time. It’s more than mere humanity too; heat is stress and stress is dipped performance. You might not be able to measure the precise financial advantage of shade in pounds and pennies, but it’s certainly there – and if your financial position is so precarious that you can’t afford to have a tree on your land then I really feel for you.

I hear this new man’s glad that it’s easier to check the cattle now. He pulls up in his truck and counts them whenever he wants. The only shade is directly underneath their bellies, and they stand panting for hours in the sun, waiting for him to come and count them again. I’m no great master of agriculture. This sounds like I think he’s got it wrong, but there are some rational drivers to explain why all those trees were pulled down on that piece of land, even if they make my stomach turn. If nothing else, grant and subsidy assessments would call it “maintenance”.

Out on the hill where my own cows are grazing, I can only make sense of them at dawn and the evening, when it’s cooling down and they come out from the trees. Even on “the hottest day of all time”, they seemed extremely contented to lie in the willows, lashing their tails. The ground up there is different and it’s not a straight comparison, but cleaning trees for better grazing strikes me as nonsense and a deliberate avoidance of nature’s way – not least because trees will only come back again, and all the work of taking them down will have to be repeated. If you were to heap all that wasted effort into a pile and put a match to it, I doubt it would even burn.

Picture: A hot day in the shade – my cows on the hill, 19/7/22