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Sustainable Farming - where is the incentive?
In 2005 English Nature (the former name of Natural England) published the paper The importance of livestock grazing for wildlife conservation, which detailed the concerns over the changes to farm support at the time which took away production subsidies and replaced them with simplified land area payments. This move meant that farmers no longer needed to produce anything from the land to receive the payment, which was made available simply to own agricultural land. It was anticipated that this would result in reduced grazing of biodiverse grasslands and the subsequent gradual decline of grassland biodiversity.
Rotten Old Grass
This is the story of our meadows, a story that goes back millions of years, the earlier part of which I’ve covered in previous blogs so I’ll pick this tale up in modern times. If you’ve take any interest in conservation and wildlife in the British Isles over the last 20 years you’ll no doubt have come across the statistic that an estimated 97% of our ‘unimproved’ grasslands have been lost in England & Wales between 1930 and 1984. Whether that figure has increased or not since the 1980’s is largely immaterial, it’s still a lot, and we’re no where...
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