Life on the Edge
a call for diversity, and more hands on farms
There is a half acre, or thereabouts, of wild woodland, down at the lowest, southernmost corner of our land. It has the feel of an ancient place, a softly decaying graveyard of the rotting skeletons of fallen trees clothed in rich green moss and sprouting ferns, the floor is deeply composted with the leaves and broken boughs of countless stormy falls, the air drips with the earthy scents of humus and petrichor. It is bounded to the south by the overgrown, crumbled remnants of an old road lined with giant, mature oak and long forgotten. But the trees spreading up through our creek are of short-lived, pioneer species—tall birch draped with hanging ivy, willow sprawling across the meandering stream and spreading its flow like mangroves, hazel rods shooting skywards from rotting stumps that once hedged the stone wall boundary of this parcel of land.
It is once tamed land reverting to its wild, undisturbed state; a pocket of natural regeneration of native wood protected by the old road and stone wall boundary on the outside and from browsing herbivores on our side by the steep banks of the creek. To enter, I must crawl beneath the gorse and slither down the bank through a tunnel of thorns. Bramble runs rampant and riotous in celebration wherever light touches the woodland floor and there are parts of thicket where it is head high and impenetrable and leggy saplings strain up through it to reach the light. In deeply shaded areas the woodland floor lies bare but for the twigs and fallen leaves of winter upon winter. In spring, wood anemones and wood sorrel decorate the leaf litter; in summer, leggy meadowsweet lined along the mud of the streamside tries, but fails to flower as the tree canopy in full leaf now closes out the sun.
The deep shade in summer is cool and welcome, a retreat from the exposure of the hill. And in winter, the deep, leaf littered soil and shelter of the trees provides refuge from the stormy elements outside. The closed trees maintain a constant, quiet ambience year round. It is a place of softness and remembering, of deep earth and rich compost, where badgers sleep and birds roost and hedgehogs hibernate. I come down here to sit on the cool earth and rest my back against the trees and soak it all up, to melt into the earth’s embrace and rest and remember how to just be. A scruffy, brown robin hops cautiously closer, eyeing me in case I might drop a worm. Treecreepers flit among the branches above. A million hoverflies produce a constant hum, a backdrop to the breeze rustling through the leaves, the softly twittering birds and the trickling stream. I lean back and close my eyes and melt into the stoic ever-presence of the earth. Little else stirs. It is a place of stillness, where the trees dominate as the current successors on this little pocket of Earth.
It is outside, on the edge of the woods, where the trees give way to scrub and heath and bramble tumbles jubilantly into the light, where life bustles. Meadowsweet, knapweed and devil’s bit flourish along the sunny stream bank, and out on the open heath, bell heather, ling and low growing western gorse show their blooms to the butterflies, and the air hums alive and busy with bees and birdsong. Pippits flock to the rocks and swallows swoop low through clouds of midges and dragonflies over the bogs and ponds; kestrels and foxes hunt for frogs and voles over the grasslands, their landscape kept open by the sheep and cattle that graze the hills and fields. From the hill above the creek, I can look out over the treetops across a patchwork landscape of so many shades of green.
A truly rich and diverse ecosystem is one that contains a mosaic of habitats.
From the tightly grazed lawns and overgrown tussocks of a grassland, or the thickets and clearings of a wood, to the wider lens of the open heath with its creeks and pockets of wood and the valley with its forests and fields, each niche making up the whole of a multitude of life. And this is the kind of landscape that I am fortunate to look upon, to be part of. One made of small, mixed farms where the hill meets the valley, where the open heath meets the wooded river through a network of small fields, meadows, scrub and wood and the hedgerows and wild verges that run through it all.
It is these marginal lands between the open hill and the closed valley, the home of the small, mixed farm, the hedges and boundaries and pockets of wild woodland and scrub, the edges where habitats meet and where wildness meets tamed, that hold the most richness and diversity of life. And this is the kind of landscape that we have lost in great swathes to the intensification, and global monopolisation, of food and farming—the push for bigger and more, higher yields, efficiency, unending growth and production to keep the wheels of the Big Machine rolling, and keep corporate pockets lined.
This is the kind of landscape that now is threatened by the EU wide, greenwashed drive to run farmers off the land.
“Brussels is well on its way to alienating and impoverishing a large part of rural Europe.
Just look at the Netherlands.
After decades of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funding that prioritized greater output, Dutch farmers are now being told they are the ultimate villains of the emissions reduction debate. …tens of thousands of Dutch livestock farms are now facing closure or mandatory state appropriation.
…farmers are literally being squeezed to death... And this is gutting rural Europe — and its 10 million family farms — from the inside out.” [1] Dr. Eoin Drea, Politico.
I have really come to learn first hand over the past few years that farmers are dealing with a unique set of challenges, struggles, and with an immeasurable depth of commitment, that can be isolating and hard to comprehend for most folks living “normal” lives and working “normal” jobs outside the farming and rural community. I don’t believe anyone (in our relatively privileged Western society) works harder, or for less, than farmers. Nor knows the land and the seasons so intimately.
But it is that isolation, that disconnection of society from the source of our sustenance, from the land and the hands that work it, that makes farmers and farming so easy to scapegoat.
“…rural Europe is being disproportionately targeted by policymakers as easy prey. So, while car manufacturers (in Germany), the nuclear industry (in France) and big pharmaceutical companies (in Ireland and other member countries) have their state sponsors to water down — or delay — proposed European legislation, farmers are being hung out to dry on the altar of the EU’s climate ambitions.”[2] Dr. Eoin Drea, Politico.
We need more farmers on the land, not less.
As Hadden Turner succinctly puts it in this powerful call for more hands on farms, What the Land Cries Out For, “The Big Ag companies and their subservient politicians and policy makers need to be ignored and resisted. We need more, many more, Good Farmers—more hands and feet on the land working convivially with it, not fewer, as the corporate liars would have us believe.”
I quite like Turner’s concept of “the Good Farmer” or good steward of the land: the small scale, traditional and regenerative farmer who, by way of familiarity, has a deep knowledge of and reverence for the land. But, what I have seen is that over decades farmers have simply been doing what they’re told, caught up in a trap of dependence on subsidy schemes that often don’t make sense and go against their own instincts and knowledge of the land. And we now have a generation of farmers so entrenched in the system that they can’t see another way—their own, generational knowledge of the land has been lost. Farmers are losing their farms because they followed the policies and now can’t afford to keep farming. I don't think that makes them bad farmers. It makes it a bad system.
And while giant corporations grab tracts of land to “offset” and carry on business as usual, for those of us who would tend our small parcels with the intimate care that only those who live on the land can, while producing food and fibre and strengthening our communities, access to land grows increasingly unaffordable. I don’t generally think much of anything from George Monbiot, or the commodified rewilding movement which seems set to only widen the divide between farming and nature (I am interested in integrating farming with nature) but occasionally Monbiot says something agreeable (this from January 2022):
“In Scotland, Shell is spending £5m extending the Glengarry forest. While Scotland needs more trees, it also needs a much better distribution of land. As big corporations and financiers pile into this market, land prices are rising so fast that local people, some of whom would like to run their own rewilding and reforestation projects, are being shut out.
A better strategy would be to spend money on strengthening the land rights of indigenous people, who tend to be the most effective guardians of ecosystems…”[3] George Monbiot, The Guardian.
We need more diversity on the land, of nature and of farming systems and farmers.
We need traditional hill farms running sheep extensively over wide open tracts of heath and hill where hen harriers hunt and hares race, just as they have for hundreds of years, and we need fields and forests and hedgerows, these pockets of wild woodland and scrub, the edges where farmed and wild places meet, and the way to achieve that is to have more people farming the land, not less. We need small farmers who know and love and live on the land, who work in the soil with hoes and hands, and to put land sovereignty back into local, small farmer’s hands because no-one knows the land so intimately as those whose livelihoods depend upon it, whose lives are tied so inextricably to the soil and the seasons.
In the words of South Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae, speaking for his rural constituency at a recent Dáil Éireann debate on the proposed culling of the national dairy herd under EU emissions targets, “[Farmers] are the real custodians of the countryside. They are the people who nurture the countryside, who work there, who keep it green, who keep it right, who maintain it and maintain our family farms.”
Back to my little pocket of wild woodland. I can see evidence of my goats finding their way down here last summer—a few nibbles on the bark of trees, a pile of dried droppings on the leaf litter. I don’t know how they got down here (I have to slither down through that tunnel of thorns) but I suspect they were driven in by the rain. I plan to bring them down here this winter to clear brambles and create space for the sheep to access shade next summer, and to work their browse-munching magic and disturbance on the flora and soil. We need and plan to plant many more trees on our land, more hedges, boundaries, edges and shelterbelts for the benefit of our livestock, our soils, and the wildlife we share the land with, to manage and integrate our land and livestock in a way that promotes and restores diversity while feeding us. To manage the land this way requires human labour, it means getting down and dirty with hands in the soil, and it requires knowledge and care for the land of the kind that is cultivated through closeness.
It means more hands on farms.
References
[1,2] Dr. Eoin Drea, Politico.eu June 2023 opinion piece, EU will regret making farmers scapegoat for climate change
[3] George Monbiot, The Guardian Jan 2022 column, Carbon offsetting is not warding off environmental collapse – it’s accelerating it
A couple of on topic books you might enjoy
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein
This is beautiful, and is an echo of what I am currently seeing and thinking about on mountain farms in Norway. Eloquent and sincere.