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Who takes the flak when "farming for the environment" schemes fail to deliver?

Kirsty Macleod

Ardlarach, Letterfinlay, Spean Bridge, Inverness-shire PH34 4DZ
Founder of PEOPLE TOO

Filed 30 Nov 05
©www.land-care.org.uk

According to the environmental industry, what the public wants to see are removal of the link between food production and subsidies, and a new style of farming that will have environmental benefits at its heart. For the moment, they have won the argument and farmers are being transformed into “habitat managers”.

Scottish farmers are capable of taking on this new role and making a great success of it. The danger, however, is that their practical skills and local knowledge are subject to interference from outside agencies, like Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) , who impose their theories on the new land management schemes and hold the purse strings. There appears to be an absence of sound practice and properly scrutinised targets in the new regime. The example below is one of many, where public money has been directed by the single-interest self-styled experts in wildlife management without much success.

Kirsty Macleod
Founder of PEOPLE TOO organisation
photo ©kimpton Graphics

The question is – who will ultimately take the flak for such expensive failures? Since SNH’s post-2000 management schemes, for example, are voluntary and not compulsory, the farming community must wake up to the danger of its reputation being savaged once again in the future when it emerges that substantial amounts of public money have been paid out with very little to show for it. The main defence against this happening is to ensure that controls over the maintenance and improvement of biodiversity are devolved away from centralised academic and single-interest organisations right down to farm level and back into the hands of the people on the ground.

The point has been made by at least one seasoned agricultural commentator that some farmers will receive new subsidies for doing very little and that the general public will take a dim view of this (1). The public may also take a dim view of “farming for the environment” when they realise how little it delivers and at what expense.

Land management payments for moorland birds in Orkney are 20 years old, with £500,000 being recently allocated by Scottish Natural Heritage (2). The general public and farmers should be demanding to see positive results in terms of hen harrier numbers.

According to SNH (3), when the Orkney moors were designated SSSIs in 1973, there were 51 breeding female harriers. Numbers rose to 95 in 1978 then by 1981 fell to about their 1973 level of 57. SNH’s predecessor, the Nature Conservancy Council, stepped in and offered management schemes to local farmers in the mid-1980s (4). SNH’s figures show that following the introduction of this publicly-funded conservation management, hen harrier numbers were not much increased by 1989 at 62 nests and then fell to 24 breeding females by 1996. The 2004 survey identified 41 nesting sites, still below the 1973 level.

Not only is this public expenditure achieving nothing, it looks like it has reached the stage of paying for earlier mistakes made by the so-called experts when they intervened in the 1980s (5). Who is asking them to deliver value-for-money and public benefits?

Mrs Kirsty Macleod

Footnotes

1. This is the view expressed recently by Joe Watson, who is the Business Editor of the Press and Journal.

2. Press and Journal report (21/11/05) : “Hen-harrier scheme offers farmers a share of £500,000”.

3. The figures that follow were given by Sue Agnew, Orkney Hen Harrier Scheme, Project Officer for SNH in a letter to K Macleod, 17th Dec, 2004. The exact text reads : “The SSSIs comprising the Orkney Mainland Moors SPA (Special Protection Area – classified under the 1979 EC Birds Directive) were mostly designated in 1973 for their biological features, including moorland breeding birds such as the hen harrier. At this time, it was estimated that there was a population of 51 breeding females. By 1978 there was a peak of 95 breeding females, but by 1981 this had declined to 57, and the next national hen harrier survey in 1989 located 62 nests. By 1996, this figure had declined, yet again, to 24 breeding females. The population remained low during the 1990s, and it is only in the past few years we have seen an increase to the most recent survey in 2004, where 41 nesting sites were identified”.

4. An extract from SNH “Facts and Figures” 2003/4, forwarded by S Agnew, details annual payments amounting to £120,000 to 18 farmers and paid out under management schemes mostly established in the mid-1980s with a projected lifespan of 20-25 years. More recent SNH payments have been given to other farmers in order to include land adjacent to the SSSI/SPA moorland area.

5. Where the conservation-style 1980s management may have “gone wrong” is merely hinted at in Sue Agnew of SNH’s letter :

“In some areas, the density of heather is such that new management is desirable to retain a variety of heather heights on the hill ground”.

According to the Press and Journal report of 21/11/05, it is only

“recent research (that has) identified a shortage of prey (for hen harriers) in the areas around their nesting sites as the main problem”.

But why has it taken the best part of 20 years to establish something that should have been known before any drastic changes to the original land management were implemented?

Will SNH get it right this time round? Apparently there is no guarantee for this :

“..there is some ongoing monitoring specifically to look at areas where the OHHS (Orkney Hen Harrier Scheme) may be contributing to overall biodiversity within Orkney, results of which will not be available for a number of years”. (S Agnew, SNH).

It is interesting to note from the Press and Journal report that the new SNH Orkney Hen Harrier Scheme Project Officer is Jude Hamilton. Miss Hamilton apparently worked previously for the RSPB, Orkney’s biggest landowner, on their corncrake initiative. RSPB-led land purchase and management for corncrakes in Orkney have been spectacularly unsuccessful in terms of increasing corncrake numbers. Official core-range counts of corncrakes, funding and management were assumed by the Scottish Office in 1993 and figures for Orkney are listed below.

Table 1: Corncrakes on Orkney