Where have all the cows gone?
I never thought that conservation grazing was ever going to be anything other than a niche area in which to work in a country where so many semi-natural habitats have been destroyed in the pursuit of improving their agricultural productivity but I was blessed to be raised in an area of Yorkshire that has retained more than most. The Ings, the floodplain meadows alongside the River Derwent, the most intact surviving example of such a habitat in the whole country, were the backdrop to my childhood. I fondly recall my uncle Alan’s sturdy black and white Friesan dairy cows ambling back down the hill to the meadows after milking back in the 1980’s. I was fascinated by the bridge over which they would all happily cross in the summer months, to access the wide open expanse of the Ings aftermath grazing, following the hay cut.
I didn’t realise it at the time, as I was too busy growing up to appreciate just how lucky we were, but people were busy fighting in the courts to protect our river, it's meadows, and the ancient farming system that created them. It was only really when I moved away, to work on a farm near Beverley that it occurred to me that the peaty land I was working on was, in fact, the cultivated lost Ings of the River Hull, drained and turned over to arable farming with not a cow to be seen. As this was the same river valley where my family originated and began dairy farming, more than 70 years before, it was extra poignant. By the time I returned home, having previously spent four days ploughing a field three times larger than the small farm we had just acquired, it was clear that we were going to have to do something a bit different to stand any chance of making it work commercially.
Pedigree cattle are given with a herd ‘prefix’, after which all the animals born into it are called, like a surname that comes first, followed by the individual animal’s name. I’d started the Rosewood herd of Dexter cattle six years earlier and the farm, which had operated for thirty years prior to our move here, had no name at all, so it adopted the herd prefix to become Rosewood Farm. The herd grew steadily over the first decade as we started to restore the ponds & hedgerows on the land whilst also adding to and upgrading the few dilapidated buildings, installing power and extending the water supply to reach all the fields.
Our uncle passed away later that year and the last dairy herd in the valley that still walked down to the Ings each day to graze in the summer, was sold. The Ings are a man made landscape, the last remnants of a once widespread farming system, were first created when Saxon settlers started to graze cattle on the floodplain of the River Derwent, more than a millennium before. The fertility giving winter floods drain away way to allow birds to nest among the abundant wildflowers that characterise floodplain meadows in spring, followed by summer hay cuts and aftermath grazing in autumn. The crop in one or more individual strips of meadow each belonged to a different farmer in the parish but upon grazing in the autumn they were treated as common grazing, when the farmers would turn their cattle out together to be managed as one large herd, until the winter floods returned. Should any one of these three vital elements (flower, feast and flood) have been lost, the landscape would be stripped of it’s special character.
Up until the 20th century conversion of floodplain meadows to arable was rare, not least because they were regularly flooded but also, in an age when hay literally powered farming and transport, meadows could be worth twice the price of the surrounding arable land. However the twentieth century brought war, and with it the sudden need for the country to increase it’s grain production after a long period of rising imports and agricultural depression. Throughout the Great War horses were still very much needed for both military service and farm power, so good hay was required to feed them, but by the return of conflict to Europe in 1939 the horse was already on it’s way out and hay was being replaced by petrol as the fuel which fed Britain. Attitudes towards meadows changed with it and they started to be seen as potentially making a contribution to the war effort by being put under the plough.
Ploughing of the Ings began long before they were protected, as part of the war effort (Yorkshire Evening Post, 1942)
By the time both of my parent’s families moved to the Derwent Valley in the late 1960’s farming was changing the landscape, supported by guaranteed prices for agricultural produce backed by the British government and then, in 1973, under the EEC's Common Agricultural Policy. Farming underwent a fast paced period of change with farmers paid to modernise, drain land, remove hedgerows, invest in new machinery, crops and livestock to push production to the max.
In 1964 the Yorkshire Derwent Scheme was built, above the tidal limit at Sutton on Derwent, to extract water from the river to supply Sheffield with drinking water. The Derwent, covering a wide catchment area originating on the North Yorkshire Moors was chosen because of the river’s water quality. The Barmby tidal barrage then followed, constructed in 1975 at the river’s confluence with the River Ouse, to prevent tidal waters from entering, in turn the Lower Derwent became a six mile long reservoir to supply Hull with drinking water. Today both the Elvington & Loftsome Bridge treatment works feed into the Yorkshire Water grid.
A campaign to save the Lower Derwent from further development for pleasure boating and to address drainage issues associated with the operation of the barrage that affected the traditional farming of the meadows was started in 1977, by a coalition of farmers and conservationists. Included in the works to construct the tidal barrage, the floodbanks were raised alongside six miles of river and new gravity fed drainage cloughs installed to retain higher water levels within the river and prevent the river from flooding the meadows in summer. The problem was that as the cloughs would not open when the river level was high it impeded drainage of the surrounding meadows, ruining the hay crops.
A key figure in this campaign was Stephen Warburton, the first employee of what would later become the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust & the undoubted saviour of the Ings, described by Jeremy Purseglove as having a ‘relentless tenacity and vision [that] ensured that the meadows weren’t lost to intensive farming or development’. The full story of how the Ings were saved is told in Ian Carstair’s book, The Yorkshire Derwent, Moments in Time.
Part of the strategy to protect the Ings from further threats to it’s conservation value involved the NCC & later English Nature buying some areas of the meadows within the Ings and leasing them back to farmers to cut for hay and graze the aftermaths, starting with Aughton Ings in 1982. Part of the rationale behind the purchases being that it would make financial sense to buy some land outright rather than paying farmers for management agreements, but the intention was never to buy it all. Around two thirds of the Ings were either retained by farmers or subsequently bought by various conservation trusts as & when they became available to ensure their continued management as hay meadows. While farmers and trusts are eligible to apply for financial help in the form of agri-environment schemes to help to fund favourable management, Natural England, as a government department, cannot apply for agri-environment funding for the land it owns, which must instead be funded directly by the Treasury.
Over the course of the first thirty years following the initial purchase of Aughton Ings, farming fortunes continued to change with many farms specialising in arable farming, no longer having a use for animal fodder or, like our uncle, are no longer farming the land. As traditional mixed farming has declined many farms have been split up & sold off on death or retirement and their association with the Ings has been severed.
The decline of grazing
Stephen Warburton researched the land use history of the Ings for a 2003 paper in which he noted that, from 1941, sheep were never grazed on the Ings but that compulsory testing of cattle for TB from the 1930s onwards was the beginning of the end for communal grazing of the aftermaths by cattle. This is echoed in places such as Dartmoor today where Purple Moor Grass increasingly dominates the moors and attempts to increase cattle numbers on the moor have been hampered by the impact of TB in the area.
In order to keep their herds healthy farmers today are encouraged, by DEFRA, to follow strict biosecurity measures, recommending double fencing along boundaries to keep individual herds separate in order to reduce the spread of disease. This is clearly at odds with what Natural England requires of graziers on Dartmoor, the matter being dismissed as ‘agricultural considerations’ and here in the Ings Natural England have even been actively removing existing internal fencing from the meadows in a bid to protect ground nesting birds from the significant impact of predation by crows, which use the fence posts as perches. Where external fencing does still remain the fences are rarely stock proof and never up to modern biosecurity standards.
Fencing is not just important for biosecurity, in a mixed farming landscape like the Ings high value crops such as potatoes and lawn turf often abut the meadows so the potential for damage caused by a herd of cows escaping is significant. The easiest way to reduce this risk, of course, is not to graze the aftermaths at all, especially when the cost and labour involved in erecting temporary fencing is not covered by the relatively little grazing available, and this is what usually happens.
One of the main advantages of grazing with sheep, rather than cattle, is that they drink less water. None of the meadows owned by Natural England have piped water supplied to them so it is up to the tenant to provide this for their livestock. Historically cattle and sheep were allowed to drink from the drainage ditches running through the valley but this is not encouraged today as it can lead to bankside erosion and sedimentation of the water course. Pumping water from the drainage ditches is one solution however, but as these drain water from the surrounding arable land it’s not possible to guarantee that the water quality remains good enough for livestock to safely drink. If you farm the adjacent land to the meadows you can run a temporary piped supply down but usually it requires taking a portable trough and filling it regularly with a bowser, the refilling of which becomes a drain upon labour and machinery at the height of summer when livestock are thirsty & harvest is in full swing, which adds another significant extra cost to grazing.
Conservation grazing helps to reduce the prevalence of dominant species in the sward
Why is cattle grazing important?
Grazing hay meadows after a hay cut has been taken helps to remove the coarser grasses, which can come to dominate ungrazed meadows. These out compete more delicate wildflowers for space and light, leading to a less botanically rich sward. A case study from Somerford Mead, in Oxfordshire, featured in the Floodplain Meadow Partnership handbook, demonstrated that grazing, and to a greater degree, grazing with cattle, results in a richer community of plants than ungrazed plots. Not only do cattle remove the excess vegetation but trampling by their large hooves helps to break up the sward and increase soil to seed contact for self seeded wildflowers.
We have also discovered, from data collected by Natural England, that cattle grazing benefits the wading bird species too, increasing the numbers feeding on the sites throughout the season, compared to ungrazed plots. As we don’t regularly use anthelmintics (pesticides) in our cattle to control parasites their dung supports a great number of invertebrates which in turn provide food for the birds. The shorter grazed swards also reduce the dominance of grasses, leading to a more open sward that benefits ground nesting birds in spring.
Management of the Ings
As the majority of the Ings are now owned by conservation charities and Natural England, who do not farm themselves, the responsibility for making hay and aftermath grazing are contracted out through the mechanism known as a ‘short term grazing license’. This document offers licensees the rights to remove hay and graze the aftermath, in exchange for a fee. In much the same way that the ancient common rights were managed by the manorial courts, with rules to dictate how the land is shared and managed, a simple legal contract now fulfils this role.
The license is based around an ‘agreement’ between the licensee and landowner, but in practise there is very little deviation on the part of the licensor, the licenses for each of the different sites being largely a facsimile of a standard template. Taking little heed of the different conservation & farming challenges presented by each site, and therefore offering little guidance to the licensee on the management required or the practicalities of farming it.
Short term grazing licenses offers the farmer no security, indeed due to the nature of floodplain and the need to protect the meadows from damage by machinery, the terms of the license offer no guarantee that they will be able to take a hay crop at all. The license covers the period from July to October each year, and Natural England reserve the right to cut short this period should late nesting birds still be present or wet weather risks damage to the land at any time. Tendering for licenses occurs every three years but NE can end the agreement early should the terms not be met.
In research for his book ‘In Search of One Last Song’, Patrick Galbraith visited Galloway, in South West Scotland, where he found a remarkably similar situation affecting graziers north of the border too. The grazier in this case, Patrick Laurie, explains the difficulty of conservation grazing when the agreement limits the number he can graze across 200 acres of historically under grazed moorland to just ten cows - 20 acres per cow. This, he explains, is born out of a worry that the cattle will poach and damage the sward, but with such a low stocking density (a situation also identified by Natural England, on Dartmoor) the chances of achieving the management aims are zero. Patrick is in a difficult position, he is given the task of achieving favourable conditions for the birds (in this case, Black Grouse) while also being dictated to how he should achieve this. If any kind of damage to the sward occurs it is written into his contract that his lease is terminated.
This approach to conservation promotes caution among farmers, actively ensuring that they cannot succeed encourages them not to try & to do as little as possible in order to preserve their continued access to the land. Here in the Ings the conditions of grazing licenses discourages mowing those areas of the meadows that may be too wet to mow and make the hay within 14 days, as stipulated in the license. Although the rules quite rightly seek to protect the plant communities for which the meadows are designated as SSSIs, any lack of hay making or grazing then allows more competitive species of grasses and sedges to dominate the sward and shade out the wildflowers anyway.
Bold new techniques, such as Corncrake friendly mowing, are allowed on a voluntary basis, but why would you bother to do this if the extra time taken to do so risks the harvest of a crop and your future tenancy of the land? In the case of grazing, the licenses state that ‘The Land will be aftermath grazed following the taking of a hay crop, and before the ground becomes poached.’ but in practice the aftermath grazing element is not enforced, and is regarded rather as a voluntary condition so this too has hastened the cessation of aftermath grazing, particularly with cattle, in the Ings.
This was how we first began to graze for Natural England, by taking on meadows that had seen neither mower nor cow for some years. The first was so overgrown with Reed Sweet-grass (Glyceria maxima) that we were unsure where exactly the meadow ended and the surrounding ditch began. Once released, the whole herd immediately disappeared in the undergrowth and it was days before we saw them again. After the cows had trampled and eaten it down we felt a little more confident to mow for hay the following year. At first the grass was coarse and had little feed or flower value, so we used it for bedding the cattle in winter, but after a couple of seasons of hay making and grazing, species richness began to return and feed value increased.
Returning hay cuts & aftermath grazing to unmanaged meadows reduces the dominance of Reed Sweet Grass
It was the same at our next site and, as we later came to realise, despite what the paperwork says, these fields were no longer ‘hay meadows’ but had become rough grazing pastures, where mowing must have ceased some time ago. Successive years of little or no grazing had resulted in swards dominated by Rushes (Juncus) and Tufted Hair-grass (Deschampsia cespitosa). These coarse species are already too mature for most cattle to eat them by the start of July so we also implemented some hay making to use as bedding in those years when the site dried out enough to cut, followed by aftermath grazing.This also had the advantage of opening up the sward so that softer grasses and wildflowers could come back, simultaneously improving both biodiversity and feed value in the hay. A particularly dry summer in 2022 gave us our first and only chance to cut the whole of the site, which rarely dries up enough to carry the weight of a tractor so that there, in most years, the hay making element of the grazing license remains an impossibility.
At first we did not have enough cattle to properly graze the entire area so we concentrated our efforts on those parts that were easiest to access, offered the best grazing for the animals and where the fences stood a reasonable chance of holding cattle. At the same time we began to buy in more breeding animals to add to the young heifers that were kept to join the breeding herd. We also retained some castrated males (steers) longer to bolster the number of mouths available for grazing. We couldn’t keep every calf born into the herd, however, as selling beef remained our sole source of income. Some agri-environment support was available to encourage grazing at the time but as it was only available to the landowner, and not the owner of the animals, our grazing under a short term license meant that we were also ineligible for funding.
The main costs involved in keeping any herd going falls mostly during the winter period. To be profitable this needs to be as short as possible but with the vast majority of our grazing being SSSI meadows and pastures we were subject to the terms in our agreements, which meant a longer than usual winter that starts in November and lasts to the end of June - a much greater financial burden than most conventional herds. We stretched this out slightly by grazing the breeding herd on the home farm for a few weeks at either end of the grazing season, but we lacked enough ground of our own to do more. The longer we could keep them outside, the more cost effective it was, and they thrive on grazed grass, whereas even the best hay merely tides them over to the next year.
Smaller, native breed cattle are better suited to grazing wetland sites which rarely completely dry out in summer
One advantage of having Dexter cattle is that they are less damaging to wetlands than heavier breeds can be, so we also tried to graze for as long as possible to make full use of the available grass and fulfil the grazing management objectives. Dexters can also process a slightly lower quality diet than modern breeds. This worked very well at first, helping to knock back & trample the more dominant grasses but as time went on, the license dates were more rigorously enforced, and grazing on it's own became less effective at tackling the coarser grasses.
The grazing license seems to be a contract written by someone who has never actually worked the land nor had any direct practical involvement with farm crops or animals. It is a recipe that sets out all the ingredients, along with a very prescriptive method, but the expected outcomes bear no relation to what such a method can be expected to achieve; without tweaking it is a recipe for failure, you might say. Another condition is that you are to; ‘To reduce or increase livestock numbers as necessary and as required by Natural England to reflect the availability of grass and other vegetation.’ Perfectly reasonable, you might think, but in practise, coupled with the fact that the license offers no guarantee that the land will be available at all, due to weather conditions, this means that you must maintain a herd theoretically capable of meeting the maximum grazing needs within a three month period from 1st August each year. But crucially this availability may vary, and you could get nothing at all, so you also need to maintain enough land elsewhere to act as a backup, potentially for up to 12 months of the year. You cannot build such variability into a grazing plan without a very reliable crystal ball so there is no benefit to the farmer in grazing animals on the Ings at all, so they don't.
When the land was first purchased the vendors were given long term commitments to be able to continue farming the land, if they so wished. This worked better because you could install & maintain fences and water supplies knowing that you could recoup the cost over the long term, and weren’t investing time and money that may just benefit the next tenant. It also gave the tenant security, knowing that they could plan to breed their own animals to graze the Ings in the future. Now that many of these long term tenants have quit either through circumstance or in frustration at not being able to operate under the license system this has created a new problem. Being part of an established farm, many of the Ings meadows previously had direct access between farm and meadow. This gave the opportunity to use the infrastructure on the farm, such as cattle handling pens, to make management of the Ings, according to the objectives, much more practical. For example, Uncle Alan’s cows were able to walk directly out of the Ings, across a bridge onto non-SSSI land (in fact, they could walk all the way back to their winter housing). This was the case for most of the meadows when they were first designated in the 1970’s and 80’s, but today licensees can be based many miles away from the Ings and make hay to sell, rather than feed their own animals.
In a perverse state of play, our main grazing site was now eight miles away from our farm, while those meadows which had direct access onto our land were let to others. Having no space to gather cattle other than within the SSSI land parcel itself we were therefore forced to construct a mobile handling pen on site, gather the cows and trailer them home at the end of the grazing season. If you are gathering them because the ground is becoming too wet then this means that damaging the ground becomes a certainty. We should, in theory, gather and remove them before the wet weather arrives but in practise this would both cut the grazing season shorter still (ergo requiring more cows to achieve the same objectives) and, with multiple different groups of cattle all grazing different sites simultaneously, we would have to start the process of removing cattle almost as soon as the last group were turned out to graze!
Solutions
So far I may have made it sound like an intractable situation, and in many ways it is, but I do still believe that, with the right approach to management, it is possible to fix all of these problems. When you consider that farmers are not paid to be conservation graziers, our time must be split between managing the cattle at grazing, making enough hay (weather permitting) to feed the herd over winter and selling enough produce to make it pay. This not only requires a great deal of advance planning to organise livestock movements to fit in with our other commitments, but also that efficiency is of paramount importance when managing the animals.
When it comes to managing farmland wildlife habitats we could learn a lot from Transylvania, the central region of Romania in Eastern Europe that has retained much of it’s patchwork of rich & diverse traditionally-farmed wildflower meadows, complete with hay making and corncrakes. Sophie Yeo writes, in ‘Nature’s Ghosts’, that pollen records show how biodiversity rocketed in Transylvania with the onset of farming in the late Neolithic, only dropping again during periods when farming was subsequently suppressed. Rising aspirations & prosperity in Romania is now, understandably, tempting young people away from the countryside & abandonment of small scale farming, just as it already has in the UK. Since Romania joined the EU in 2007, farmers have been offered subsidies designed to protect the meadows, but their standardised rules erode the ability of small scale farmers to manage the complexity of weather, people & animals that has created and maintained the hay meadow landscapes. The meadows and their Corncrakes are now threatened, ironically, by the very EU subsidies and management agreements designed to ‘save’ them.
A traditionally farmed strip hay meadow in Transylvania
Credit; Paul White
Fundatia ADEPT is an NGO in Romania that works to preserve biodiversity by supporting income generation within the traditional farming communities to preserve the habitats they initially created. By contrast, here in the UK we have continued with the EU model, after Brexit, of compensating farmers for the losses incurred by preserving habitats, which makes them more dependent upon continued and ongoing funding for their survival. In the case of the Ings, where no additional funding is available, mowing and grazing relies upon farmers being able to generate a profit from the hay and/or grazing, within the constraints of the license conditions, the difficulty of which is part of the reason why they use short term contracts.
While in the UK we may delay mowing until August to save the Corncrake, with limited success, Transylvania, Yeo writes, ‘is stuffed full of Corncrakes’, despite the fact that Romanian farmers do not wait until August, when the grass is past it’s best, to begin mowing, instead they mow when it suits them, when the time is right for good hay making. Here in the Yorkshire, by mandating that all the meadows may only be mown from July 1st (in the absence of Corncrakes) every farmer in the valley now descends on the meadows at the same time, with ever bigger mowers and faster tractors, because time is of the essence to get the hay made, baled and removed as quickly as possible. Rather than finding refuge in a patchwork of uncut meadows and growing aftermaths, as in Transylvania, the birds struggle to escape the mowers. Those that do escape to find refuge in the uncut margins are then concentrated in linear strips, which makes them easy pickings for predators.
At Rosewood we aim to operate a sustainable farming system that generates an income from the hay & grazing by selling the end product - beef, directly to the public. Although this food gains us a higher price than selling live animals, processing and distribution does incur additional labour & costs, so it’s important that the production remains efficient. There is only so much that people can be expected to pay for food that supports conservation, after all. Farming in the Ings developed as a relatively minor, albeit important, part of a mixed farm economy. No longer can we rely upon a cheap, plentiful and willing skilled labour force in the countryside. To reinstate the old ways of many small farms would involve some seismic shifts in society that are just not going to happen today so we do need to operate at a reasonable scale.
Farming is a business, not a public service, we don’t receive a salary so our income depends upon being able to prioritise our time and spending carefully so as to avoid wasting resources and hopefully, leave a surplus. The demand for conservation grazing has been huge and we receive several enquiries each year for new sites to either cut and/or graze, mainly from people who don’t have the means to carry out the work themselves. Often such opportunities are presented to us either as a favour or with an expectation of receiving a payment for the crop. However with many such fields being so small and distant from our existing grazing, the economics of making hay and aftermath grazing are rarely covered by the feed it provides.
Our most distant hay meadow lies 8.4 miles away from the farm by road, and while it is a fine example of a species-rich floodplain meadow, at 1.8 acres of mowable area it yields just 15 bales from the single cut and is more a labour of love than a sound financial proposition. Fifteen bales isn’t an insignificant number but when you consider the time involved in mowing, turning the hay several times, baling and transporting the bales, it soon mounts up to being the most expensive hay that we make.
Moving bales over a long distance takes up a lot of time, making hay close to the farm speeds the process up considerably
If we cannot make enough hay ourselves we must buy it in. At £25 per bale (which would be cheap for good quality hay) that sets a baseline cost. Combining this meadow with another small hay cut nearby reduces the travel costs by half, but even so these two combined still equates to 3.63 MPB (miles per bale). The tractor (small enough to access the meadow) travels at 14 MPH so by paying a driver the minimum wage costs us £44 per bale, a loss of £19 per bale, just in the time spent traveling to & from the field to make the crop! We enjoy maintaining these meadows but the only way we can continue to do so is by having large areas nearby, to compensate.
When it comes to making hay and conservation grazing, another important factor is the internal layout of the landscape. Moving cattle, as we do, using electric fences or GPS collars enables us to more carefully control the grazing pressure by changing the stocking density within a site to more heavily graze some areas, which helps to manage undesirable or dominant species, such as Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) or Common Reed (Phragmites australis), but also to avoid grazing areas containing rare or diverse wildflowers for a time so that they have a chance to set seed and spread.
A large part of the rich floral diversity in wetlands is a result of the way water levels are managed so drainage ditches feature heavily across the landscape. As much as they may aid the flow of water, ditches also dictate the flow of hay and cattle around the Ings. Bridges and gateways were originally positioned to provide access, via the shortest practical route from meadow to stackyard. It now may involve a long and convoluted route to bring in the hay via the official access to the road and move the cattle. This wastes significant amounts of time and causes unnecessary trampling of the meadows when moving hay and equipment that could so easily be solved with a few simple modernisations to the layout. In places bridges remain in situ but were no longer maintained after they stopped being used by horse and cart, so are no longer safe for use by neither modern machinery nor herds of cattle.
When juggling the demands of multiple SSSI sites concurrently, all requiring the same management, we cannot be in more than once place at a time which inevitably incurs the wrath of Natural England for tardiness. Rather than helping to improve the situation by making simple changes that would aid timely management, they take the position that it is the licensee’s responsibility to deal with such issues, at their own expense. Actions such as maintaining handling pens and fences, installing water supplies for the animals or creating a refuge area where bales can be moved, temporarily, to await collection, would help greatly to make conservation grazing possible on all sites, for all tenants, and I have suggested such changes many times before.
Last year we were hopeful that Natural England had begun to recognise the need for change when a new land agent took over the administration of the Ings land. She arranged for us to have a meeting to discuss all of the ongoing issues with the grazing & infrastructure. I was unsure how productive a meeting in the office might be, given that many of the problems had to be seen on the ground to be believed. Nonetheless an effort was being made and we arranged to have another meeting, on site, in spring. Here we saw the large breech in the Environment Agency maintained floodbank that had been causing flash flooding in our meadows & pastures for the past five years.
We also inspected some of the perimeter fences, which varied from needing a few replacement posts to non-existent. Our main issue, however, was that with insufficient hay to feed the herd over the winter, we really needed to know well in advance, either way, whether enough hay meadows would be available to us in 2025, so that we could decide if it was worth spending more money on hay to keep all the cows over winter, or not.
When details did arrive in the post for the tenders for 2025, later that summer, we were pleased to see that Natural England had grouped all the nearby meadows into fewer, combined lots. This would enable haymaking to be carried out in a much more efficient way, reducing the amount of time spent traveling back and forth between many small and disparate meadows, which would significantly reduce our MPB! Secondly, they would also consider whether licensees proposed to provide aftermath grazing and the proximity of the licensee’s farm to the meadows, again seeking to minimise the environmental impact and considering whether licensees would follow up with aftermath grazing. This was a progressive step forward. With winter fast approaching and needing to plan our winter hay stocks for 2025/26, we returned the forms to the land agent and waited. By mid-August, worried that our application hadn’t been received, I contacted the land agent to confirm receipt. Eleven days later I received a reply to say that the new land agent had left Natural England. My heart sank, this wasn’t good news.
The weather wasn’t giving us a break either, with intermittent rain resulting in further delays to baling the last of the hay for bedding, we were fast approaching the end of the grazing season. With seven different groups of cattle to gather up and move home for winter, the fences were again making this difficult - when there remains good grass underfoot the cattle do not see the point in leaving their field just because it is the end of October and insecure fences make it risky (that they might escape) while rounding up into the holding pen. Alas, we did not clear all the bales in time and we had to admit defeat & not risk damaging the land by trying to move them off. With a large area of coarse material successfully mown and baled in 2024 it would at least improve the grazing for next season, and open up the sward for the benefit of ground nesting bird like Snipe & Lapwing, the following Spring.
In the meantime we were told by the estate agent that took over the tendering process that our bids for both lots had been accepted, subject to contract. At last we could breathe a massive sigh of relief. We started to budget for an expensive winter ahead, making a plan to buy in hay to see us over winter, a second tractor to make & move hay bales more quickly, and to pay the rent for the 2025 season.
This year, six weeks before the grazing season was due to begin, we still hadn’t received the contract. It was then that the estate agent got in touch and told us that their offer had been withdrawn and that we, and the cows, would not be required this year. Another tenant had been found for the hay meadows, and the rough grazing was to be managed ‘in house’. I was in shock; once again poor communication within Natural England has led to us picking up the tab. After many years of being told that the money was simply not available to improve the grazing infrastructure in the Ings, I was also shocked to learn that they had found the funds to purchase significant amounts of additional land.
A better way
It was when we began to graze cattle for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust in 2021 that I discovered that there was a better way than this to manage nature reserves. It was with some trepidation that we first said yes to grazing for the Trust, not wishing to add to the burden by keeping animals even further away from the farm. However when we visited the site for the first time we could see that the Trust were keen to restore grazing to the land and their fences were far more stock proof than those we had become used to.
Dedicated stock handling pens greatly improves the management of SSSIs
That is not to say that grazing has always been easy, many of their sites do share similar access problems as the Ings, but their commitment to being involved with the grazing planning and being present with the cows means that they are able to experience the problems first hand and work towards creating appropriate solutions. Firstly, each Trust site has it’s own, permanent cattle gathering pen, significantly reducing the labour input required to transport and set up extra equipment. As I have mentioned, their fences are maintained, and where they need improvements, the budget is sought and the work completed promptly. They have also been actively improving their sites to aid animal movement and to manage the grazing better, investing in new and improved handling pens. Each Trust site has a team of dedicated volunteer livestock checkers who perform the daily checks needed alongside modern technology to enable us to monitor the cows remotely. And best of all, they provide a supply of drinking water to all sites!
Looking forward
Back on the farm at home, as I walk through a patch of wild flowers covered in wild bees, I reflect upon what we are doing and what future direction to take. Our farm isn’t a nature reserve, but nor is it a modern monoculture. We produce food and nature, side by side, guided by the principle of not using pesticides and to ensure that every part of the farm supports nature. Nor is the farm a museum; we utilise modern technology where possible to help us to farm in a more sustainable way. We’ve now done all we can to restore cattle grazing to the Ings, but it’s cost us dearly and on that we appear to have made so little progress.
The concept of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) - the new scheme where developers ‘buy’ habitat gains on farms to offset those that they destroy seems to favour the most intensive, most nature depleted farms where the potential for gains is greatest, rewarding those farms for putting back what is already gone. Whether you agree with developers being allowed to offset their habitat destruction or not, small farms that never intensified in the first place have least to offer BNG.
Small farms suit small meadows, that’s true, and there are plenty of these meadows still in existence locally, restored or recreated by a diverse range of owners who have one thing in common - they all want to continue the traditional management to preserve nature rich habitats. But there are good reasons why small meadows are no longer profitable, and without the bread-and-butter of large areas of hay to cut to offset the cost of the time and machines for the small ones, I should question whether we can afford to continue offering such a service.
The benefits of nature-friendly farming are endorsed by Natural England and they acknowledge the challenges farmers face, yet cling to the short term management agreements as a model, which encourages us to farm more intensively, not less. We have gained support through the Catchment Sensitive Farming service but that only applies to our own farm, and doesn’t help with management that happens in partnership with other landowners. The problem is that Natural England has such a wide remit with all the different departments each working on their own particular responsibilities without much if any consideration of how the landscape works as a whole. Thriving farm businesses that are also home to wildlife rich habitats need long term stability - they cannot be expected to balance precariously on short term cycles of unrealistic expectations and constant change.
Sir John Lawton, president of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust describes the Lower Derwent Valley Ings, as a ‘hidden gem’ of Yorkshire, a sentiment I echo. He should be proud of the Trust’s commitment to returning conservation grazing to their nature reserves, despite the challenges it presents. Our hope now is that we can continue to produce & feed a surplus of cattle from our farm each year to provide the grazing animals needed to fulfill that role.
In his 2010 report Making Space for Nature Lawton wrote of making wildlife sites bigger, better and more joined up, and at first I believed that was the direction in which we were heading. However as time went on, and as recent events have confirmed, it became increasingly apparent that all the money provided by the government to manage nature reserves has gone towards expanding space for nature and engaging more with the wider public about it without acknowledging that it's so important that we maintain that which we already have.
It seems that many of those responsible for nature don't really understand farming or how interconnected it is to nature recovery in England. We must now concentrate on the habitats provided on our own farm, managing those places where the grazing of SSSIs is encouraged, and try not to think too much about meadows where cattle grazing is all but a distant memory.
I’ll leave you with the words of Stephen Warburton;
