post Wolf moon
In my 60th year, after a couple of nights under snow and ice, I explore some of the thinking going on ‘out there’. Even if this might complicate my argument or challenge my prejudices, with ‘radical’ grace as in the finding the space to do so (as per this podcast).
Forest diversity
The establishment of trees in the UK is time-labour-sensitive complex issue few recognise when delays in forestry planting plans and weather pitch against government targets for increasing tree cover.
Arable Futures
An annual event at the James Hutton Institute was framed in a more audience interactive way. This included a panel of younger generation ‘challenging’ the room with questions around the future of arable farming in Scotland.
Woody walking festival
Setting the context of a diversity of tree species, wildlife keen on eating trees, alongside the various outputs required from woodlands, helps explore often gnarly issues without kneejerk responses.
Gate to the north
A northern trip took in the areas around Rothbury in Northumberland. Tea and cake with a local farmer and a drive-around with the Wildlife Trusts’s onsite manager gleans more intel than a newspaper headline.
Grade 1 peat
Driving through the Fens I stop for a chat with a farmer near the lowest point in the UK (Holme Posts). The picture below needs few words…or perhaps it does in the 40 years of this farmer’s experience of farming a BMV (Best and Most Versatile) Grade 1 soil. BMV for food production or holding onto carbon?
Curlew ‘farming’
Back up north, there’s a patch of the Yorkshire Dales heaving with ground-nesting waders of conservation concern; even if the minor public road is hardly heaving with birdwatchers. I won’t say how the land is managed, as you can find that out for yourself.
London wildlife
Helping put this nature restoration event together and then moderating the day, with ‘house rules’ was fun, if challenging. While plenty of people want to be on the panel, other people need to be in the room to create dynamic dialogue out of which unscripted opportunity can often be forged.
Herts and minds
Groundswell celebrated it’s 10th year in some hot dusty Hertfordshire fields. There’s no doubt a thirst for knowledge, though some of the offerings from both the States and Cumbria were laden with crowd-rousing rhetoric, a corporate ‘wilded’ its Kitkat….whereas I merely hosted this Dragon’s Den session.
Balm on the land
Over at the dust-free Royal Society, a medal was awarded to a professor at the academic ‘front line’ of agriculture and the environment. Far away from fields and farming policy, there’s a robust polite fisticuffs over some of the issues. Odd, as both the Land Use Framework and Climate Change Committee propose circa 9% of land being repurposed for non-food producing outcomes (see next heading below).
Beds for wildlife
While in some circles it’s fashionable to knock ‘large landowners’, some are quietly creating large scale habitats for ‘wild’ nature. Of course farmland nature is important but there’s a surprising amount of ‘heavy’ or ‘steep’ land ready to be optimised without threatening to destabilise groaning shelves of ‘food’.
Profitable stocking
Every year I visit the Royal Welsh show for briefing breakfasts and informal work meetings, I take time to hang out in the livestock sheds. Generations of families from rural communities snooze, ‘shepherd’, groom, show, chat, drink, laugh. As the ‘agri’ shifts, we must keep an eye out and help the ‘culture’ adapt.
Cultural shift
The knackered ash tree and manure spreader are bygone relics sitting alongside AI tourist-ridden paths near Malham Cove in the Dales. A pause can help acknowledge the past; here’s a ‘Gutenberg moment‘ piece on the [just] transition from the old to the new ways. The interregnum is rough, unready and requiring resilience in diversity of thinking, perhaps not yet fully realised.
Non-binary thinking
When it is so easy to fall into easy groupthink ‘left or right’ tribal identity, learning about how to balance use of the right side and left side of our brains may be harder. But a lot more worth while in the long run.
Heading in the right direction….
If there are that over 9000 new applicants to Defra’s Capital grants for the first time, including 20k km of stock fencing, and the just-launched Farmer Collaboration Fund will no doubt be oversubscribed (esp as it’s not just farmers in the field), there’s a subtle shift perhaps underway.
mind you, in a Secretary of State whirl, it’s better to forge ahead without relying too much on the govt.
