Monthly Archives: February 2012

Seeing the wood for the trees

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I mentioned in my last post the coppice woodland at Vallis Veg – now officially ‘non-coppice woodland’ courtesy of the Rural Payments Agency, as I explained. That seems to lead naturally into a discussion of woodland at our site – or more specifically into the vexed question of the relationship between woodland, grassland and cropland – which I shall probably have to explore in more detail over time.

To start with, let me outline the different land usages on our site. When we bought the land (around 18 acres altogether) it was 100% permanent pasture. We now have about 2 acres of cropland (though some of this is down to temporary grass leys), 5 acres of permanent pasture and 10 acres of woodland. The woodland in turn breaks down into orchards (2 acres); forest garden (1 acre); ash, hornbeam and willow coppice (3 acres); and amenity woodland (4 acres).

I’ll assume that the orchards and forest garden are fairly uncontroversial forms of land use – I’ll probably post more about them in the future. What’s getting increasingly contentious these days (not that you’ll read about it in The Sun – though maybe one day you will…that’ll be when we know we really have blown it ecologically) is the balance between woodland proper, permanent grassland and cropland.

In his excellent book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie writes “There is a fringe of the green movement which has managed to reduce the complexity of nature to the formula ‘trees good, no trees bad’….If such people get hold of an area of grassland, often the first thing they want to do with it is plant trees all over it. The fact that someone, a long time ago, went to a lot of trouble to get the trees out, and that generations of people have spent energy making sure that trees stayed out, is lost on them” (p.239). In contrast to the products of the grassland a tree trunk, says Fairlie, is “a triumph of inedibility” (p.233).

Incidentally, I keep referring to Fairlie’s book on this blog, calling it ‘excellent’, and then disagreeing with it…and I’m now going to do it again. But it is excellent – the most comprehensive and nuanced case for global small-scale agriculture that I’ve come across.

Fairlie’s point is that woodland is a low value, fairly unproductive land use, whereas good agricultural land is best reserved for higher value agricultural use – particularly as we look forward to a time when we may have to make more effective use of every bit of farmland we have. The tree fetishists, on the other hand, have more nebulous – perhaps even spiritual – ends, like creating nice treescapes for human repose. Such dilettantism cuts little ice with Fairlie – “Woodland today,” he says, “is often planted according to the whims of people whose material livelihoods are more or less unrelated to the rural economy, so if these plantations meet the needs of future generations, it will be more by luck than design” (p.242).

Now, we did plant the amenity woodland at Vallis Veg with some of these vaguer aims in mind. Certainly, despite their inedible trunks, people seem to have a spiritual affinity for trees rarely felt for the annual herbaceous plants that actually feed them, with the possible exception of wheat (we had no trouble recruiting people to help us plant trees at Vallis Veg, whereas volunteers for my onion-weeding events are thinner on the ground). We also planted trees for what seemed at the time more practical objectives – future timber, privacy screening, wind protection, biodiversity, carbon sequestration. We didn’t feel able to manage livestock on the whole 18 acres, so woodland instead of grassland seemed like a good idea.

Reading Fairlie’s analysis has given me pause for thought. Support for it comes from woodland expert Oliver Rackham’s formidable (and excellent) book Woodlands. Rackham points out that woodland plantation on farmed grassland doesn’t usually add much biodiversity, mainly benefitting wildlife that’s already thriving like deer, pheasants, rooks and squirrels (oops…) And you don’t ever get a woodland ground flora if you plant on farmed grassland – you just get tussocky, weedy grass (though actually that is quite good for a lot of wildlife, though hardly very productive agriculturally). Rackham also dismisses carbon sequestration as a worthwhile objective for UK woodland plantation. “Exhorting people to plant trees to sequester carbon dioxide is like telling them to drink more water to hold down rising sea level” (p.439), he says, which is probably a fair point, and not a bad analogy inasmuch as tree-planting and water-drinking are essentially both parts of short-term cycles, whereas the real issue with carbon is our exhumation of long-sequestered reserves laid down in coal measures and oilfields.

So can a case still be made for farmed grassland wood plantations? I think so, if it’s done with proper care. For starters, I’d make the following two points:

  • because energy is currently so cheap, wood can be economically imported from almost anywhere for almost any use, including low grade ones like firewood. In the future, that’s unlikely to be the case. Demand for local firewood, craft wood and other forms of coppiced wood is likely to be high, so there’s a case for establishing local plantations – certainly not on all farmland, but possibly on some farmland. In this respect, I disagree with Fairlie’s view that people who aren’t tied to the current rural economy will make worse decisions when it comes to woodland than those who are. Rackham says “The landscape is full of trees grown for obsolete reasons, and probably always will be” (p.361). There have been times in history when coppice woodland fetched more per acre than arable land – the tree fetishists may yet prove to be right!
  • the main alternative to woodland is usually permanent pasture with grass-fed ruminants, and this is a low productivity system. With a bit of ingenuity, woodland systems may be equally productive. To make ruminant systems more productive would involve ploughing up permanent pasture and adopting grass ley/arable farming – but this has drastically negative environmental consequences, and most of the yield benefit would probably come from a one-time cash-in of the fertility accumulated in the permanent pasture.

The crux comes I think with the ‘ingenuity’ I mention that’s required to make woodland as productive as permanent pasture. Having watched my plantation ecosystem develop for a few years now, and having read Fairlie and Rackham’s thoughts on the matter, I’ve come to think that we probably do need to intervene more actively to balance some of our original goals with a greater emphasis on productivity. Here are my current three favourite ideas:

  • wood pasture: both ruminants and woodland are low productivity systems, so hey why not put them both together and graze ruminants on the grass between the trees? There are lots of practical issues to sort out here – the tendency of the animals to eat the trees rather than the grass (which probably indicates that all pasture ought really to be wood pasture), the competition between trees and grass (what Fairlie calls ‘the struggle between light and shade’) and so on. But there is a long and noble history of wood pasture in the UK, now sadly neglected in the face of intensive modern agriculture. Time perhaps to bring it back?
  • pigs, chickens and people: all edgeland creatures to a greater or lesser extent, happiest neither in deep forest nor treeless plain. So perhaps we can structure our woodland for our mutual benefit – acorns, crab apples and beech mast for the pigs (in addition to some fodder crops, of which more another time); invertebrates and perches for the chickens; birch wine, rowan jelly, acorn bread and hammocks for the people. Sounds idyllic.
  • forest gardening: this is catching on quickly, aided by publications such as Martin Crawford’s recent Creating A Forest Garden – the third and final excellent book that I need to mention in this post. But most forest garden designs are quite intensive, involving lots of fruit and nut harvesting amongst other things. Perhaps there’s also scope for lower input, more foresty forest gardens, involving…what exactly? Ah well, that’s a topic for another time.

In this post I’ve talked mostly about woodland, but really it needs to be looked at in the context of grassland and cropland as well so I’ll try to post some more on that soon. In the mean time, I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on tree plantations, particularly if you’ve created a plantation yourself, so do please post your comments – I know you’re out there reading this, because I have the website stats to prove it!

A Parable of the Talents…

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I don’t suppose I have much in common with the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s fourth richest man, but I discovered recently that we share an income source. Both of us get EU handouts courtesy of the Common Agricultural Policy. I think the duke must have the system better sussed than me judging by our pay cheques: a cool £820,000 for the duke, and a not very cool £700.15 for me.

I derived the former figure from an interesting article by George Monbiot, in which he named and shamed some of the major beneficiaries of the CAP – who also happen to be some of the major landowners, since CAP payments are largely tied to size of holding. As Monbiot points out, this negative tax for the rich is not exactly progressive. Unfortunately, the mud sticks to farmers of all kinds – we all seem to suffer from the stereotype of the agricultural subsidy junky in the public imagination. So as someone feeding at a lower trophic level on the EU gravy train, I’d like to share my CAP experience with you as a prelude to asking whether we shouldn’t just get rid of the whole damn thing, as Monbiot suggests. The answer is of course we should – so long as its beneficiaries are prepared to make the sacrifice. And by beneficiaries I don’t mean the Duke of Westminster and his ilk, though I share Monbiot’s distaste. I mean the great British consumer – in other words, you and me.

But first, here’s a brief summary of one small farmer’s CAP experience. When I first bought my 7 hectares of Somerset farmland the single farm payment was just coming in and I was very green in countryside matters, so I let the whole thing slip past me with a certain lofty disdain. I wasn’t earning my living from farming at the time, and it felt good to be above all the money grubbing. Fast forward seven years and I’m a full-time veg grower, annual income circa £5,000, and suddenly the single farm payment doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. So to cut a long story short, we invested no little time and money in buying the SFP entitlements we should have started with, and on 1 December 2010 (I remember the date) found that our bank account was £738.31 to the good.

Fast forward another year, and some weeks after I’d submitted my next claim I discover that the Rural Payments Agency has decided to audit it. A thick wodge of papers is (mis)delivered in the post, including a satellite photo of my holding extensively annotated to indicate where the RPA, in its wisdom, disagrees with my claims. One of the many sticking points was the newly planted coppice woodland which the RPA described as ‘non-coppice woodland’, and therefore a ‘permanently ineligible feature’. I spend most of an afternoon when I should have been actually farming striding around the holding with camera and GPS, trying to fit the fine and immeasurable distinctions of a working smallholding into the RPA’s taxonomic grid. Several letters and telephone calls follow, the result of which is that I concede to the RPA’s view of things in every respect. When, for example, I explain that the ‘non-coppice woodland’ is in fact coppice woodland that is still too young to coppice, the charmingly polite civil servant at the RPA says “Ah well, it’s not coppice woodland then is it, if it hasn’t been coppiced yet?” What chance do I have against the grinding logic of the RPA?

As a quick aside, I have to note that if instead of planting coppice I had simply cut the grass annually on the site where the coppice stands I would have received the subsidy, whereas the fact that I’m in the process of developing it as wood pasture disqualifies it, at least for now (though I was advised to contact the Forestry Commission to see if I was eligible for another subsidy) – which tells you first of all that there’s a disastrous disjunction in rural policy between farming and forestry, and second of all that bureaucracies can’t deal with things that don’t happen on an annual cycle, like developing a sustainable farm ecology for example.

Anyway, enough enough. It’s easy to mock bureaucracy, but those of us who accept money from the public purse can hardly complain when we’re subjected to scrutiny. I’m sure there are many who will sleep easier knowing that as a result of their extensive investigations into my holding the RPA saved the taxpayer £38.16 this year. It probably cost them more to mount the enquiry, but broader principles are at stake.

So much for the details of my own personal CAP odyssey. What are the larger issues? Well, first of all it’s worth bearing in mind that the total income from UK agriculture is about £4.3 billion, and CAP payments total around £3.3 billion – so I imagine that the CAP is keeping many farmers afloat, which doubtless is where the subsidy-junky gibe comes from. But then again, why are farmers so reliant on their subsidies? Could it have anything to do with the fact that we’re remunerated at close to or less than the costs of production? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Tesco, Britain’s largest food retailer, reports operating profits in excess of £3.8 billion, an increase of nearly 50% in four years? And could that have anything to do with the fact that UK consumers now spend less than half the proportion of household income on food than they did fifty years ago?

The issue of farm subsidies is a complex one, but the big food companies and, through them, the consumer benefit both directly and indirectly from them. They benefit indirectly through a subsidy regimen that keeps farmers just about afloat so that the retailer can pay unreasonably low farm gate prices, mark them up (or ‘add value’ to them, in the weasel words of the recent Foresight Report), and then sell them on to consumers at ‘competitive’ prices. It’s neat politics – placating the all powerful figures of the retailer and the voter/consumer, while the farmers get the blame for their subsidy-dependent ways, meanwhile being forced into ever more vicious competition with each other in the global race to the bottom caused by abstract, planet-trashing consumerism.

Talking of planet-trashing, another aspect of the CAP regimen is environmental payments for ‘green’ agricultural practice. On this topic, George Monbiot says, “The rest of us don’t get paid for not mugging old ladies. Why should farmers be paid for not trashing the biosphere? Why should they not be legally bound to protect it, as other businesses are?”

No doubt these are good questions. But if farmers are legally bound to protect the biosphere then by the same token it must surely be reasonable for them to pass on the additional costs of not trashing the biosphere to the people buying their produce. And is that something we, the consumer, are prepared for? Will we cope without our £5 chickens, our £5 potato sacks, our buy-one-get-one-frees? Will we happily buy vegetables from local agroecological growers because we know that they’re growing our food responsibly and well? And before we deride farmers for their subsidy habit, will we first look in the mirror?

A (non-political) blog about vegetable recipes…

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One of the reasons I started this blog was that I thought it would be good to have recipes and information for customers available online in an easily archived format. But whenever I sit in front of a nice big blank computer screen the urge to write about the politics of food and farming is overwhelming – hence the underwhelming number of recipes and vegetable posts to date.

Actually, the question of vegetable recipes is quite political too. More than a few ex-customers and potential customers have told us that they’d like to get a box from us, but they can’t really cope with all of the unprocessed veg coming at them in their weekly box. Much could be written about the implications of our fast-paced modern consumerist lifestyle that prevents us from having the time to prepare and cook vegetables, or allows us to ‘cherry-pick’ just a few favourites and forget the virtues of much honest old provender – particularly at this time of year when the boxes are full of parsnips, swede, kale and such like. But hey ho, blah blah, instead of going off on another rant I just want to draw your attention to two excellent sources for box scheme-appropriate recipes, which do a far better job than I could possibly ever do – one is professional cookery writer Laura Washburn’s excellent blog Farm Box Days, in which she handily archives a bunch of her scrumptious recipes that she uses for her own veg box by vegetable type and season. And the other is the Boxing Clever Cookbook by Jacqui Jones and Joan Wilmot – worth getting once again for its delicious, seasonal and box scheme-relevant recipes.

Hey, I actually enjoyed steering clear of politics in this post and focusing on something down to earth and non-contentious. Next week: the Common Agricultural Policy.