Andrew

As far as things have changed, I’m thinking here about minimum tillage – so that’s about not turning the ground over as much, and what that requires you to do very often is use bigger equipment because you need a bigger tractor to pull your drill – you have to change your equipment… but min-till at the moment cannot operate without glyphosate. It just physically can’t, and that partly is an issue about change, for me. But they’re using so many chemical applications currently that I don’t get hung up on that one. If you think about it though you understand that for your average crop of wheat, barley… there are maybe 12, 15 applications of chemical in it’s current season.

Matt

In some ways that surprising… my Grandad did chemical spraying for a while and he and actually a number of family, friends and people I’ve encountered around Holderness over the years have contracted cancers and neurological diseases within that community… but maybe we assume on some level or maybe it’s just not spotlighted, the amount of chemicals being applied across farmland now.

A

I believe it’s safer and more regulated now in the way in which it’s done, and to the precision in which it’s used, but the regularity… we are probably spraying much less chemical in the farming business, but the area we’re applying it over is probably significantly increased. In the last 30 or 40 years, if we think about when it regularly came into usage in this country, then it’s around the 1970s – for me that’s not too far away. It’s within all the working lifetimes of all the farmers that are currently working, even if they’re only part-time or they have a grandson or granddaughter working with them. So some of them have come into a chemical scenario, and others have never worked outside a chemical scenario. So you come back now to shifting baselines. It’s really useful for me knowing that you have an understanding of Holderness, and those flatlands. In the last few years what I think we’re really seeing is the issue with extreme weather conditions.

M

Absolutely – it’s something we’ve always had to contend with but as the worrying trajectory becomes certain, weather events and planning forward become more and more uncertain.

A

Yes. So it’s really… how do those individuals work with that uncertainty, in a crop rotation system that probably works on seven years for them. So again, trying to understand from farmers business point of view – and we can just look at that as business – I don’t see them necessarily as guardians of the countryside – but theirs is a seven year rotation, and I don’t think that we think like that. Within that change, you’re probably, on the bigger end of the market with bigger equipment they’re only working on a five-year life-cycle for their piece of equipment, because they decrease in value so much… for example you might buy a piece of kit like a crawler that might have been £250,000 six or seven years ago – that would do ten days in the field. So you also have those kinds of considerations when we’re talking about industry shifting baselines, and the ecological side as well. I feel, in Holderness, we are not making much progress. We’re going backwards still. From an ecological point of view, there’s one or two that are trying, but only yesterday I don’t know whether you saw that the government have not renewed the ban on cutting hedgerows. So you can now cut a hedgerow in spring, summer, anytime you want. And the hedgerow you see for me is a misconception. Most hedgerows are green fences – they don’t function as trees, a hedgerow habitat - they’re just a farms linear demarcation. And most farmers cannot not cut their hedges.

M

It's an odd thing again though isn’t it, like we have these ideas about being protecting what exists on those lines, and a kind of revulsion around changing the way things traditionally have been seen as ecologically – even if they are predominantly industrially – beneficial, but 3,000 years ago… you know we’re accepting – and I find it really interesting this idea – that we’re embedded in this image of a countryside which is propped up in so many ways as something untouchable as a default for the way our natural habitats should look and function by our political system – often what we mean by natural state means an agriculturally productive and receptive state – an ecology that supports agriculture. Since the Neolithic revolution, because of necessity, admittedly, in this corner of Europe even though we’re politically treating farmers you could say with a fair amount of contempt, even worse so for the ‘truer‘, deeper ecologies that support and enable everything we do with the land.

A

For me I feel that you can only look in current living memory, because beyond that we get rose-tinted glasses. You know, pre-1920, when rickets was rife and food was bad, everybody harks back to this wonderful time, and we aren’t going back to those positions even if we wanted to because climate change is driving a different landscape. I only look forward now. So if we’re talking landscape recovery, from a nature point of view, I’m looking at that within a future climate-changed landscape.

M

We do seem to have this great capacity for adaptation – prehistory does tell us that but so does living memory I think. I’m interested in the boundaries and parameters of that capacity, societally. You know you mentioned the 1970s – a decade synonymous with environmental awareness and engagement, or a desire for change – I was reading some issues of The Ecologist a few months ago, from the early 70s, and it feels very much like you say – it’s so striking – we’re in pretty much exactly the same place politically.

A

Exactly, 100 percent. People like myself who have been involved in conversation since the 1970s have done very little, and we are still going downhill from an ecological point of view. So what have we been doing? What I’m thinking around at the moment is how we advocate for this new landscape. How do we show people what they don’t know. And I’m very interested in AI, and AI visioning for a future landscape, to show farmers how things would change in a timeframe we would understand.

M

Do you have any observations of people’s perceptions over time – farmers perceptions – around wildlife, and a tension between wildlife and managing that land?

A

Well, that exists exactly the same in the business-built environment. So we work with businesses, and I had a CEO of a development company tell us – and this was really useful, that he’s frightened of wildlife. Because it stops him doing what he’s doing. And that kind of honesty is good. So I made sure I would never do anything to introduce bats to any of his buildings. I’d never put a bat box in, never put cavities in, nothing. Because the gain that you would get ecologically, is miniscule. It ticks the greenwash box, but if he ever gets a bat in any of one of those sites, it stops their operation, and you’ve switched them of to all wildlife. So why create that scenario that causes him a problem? Swift boxes in this building are a different story – you could put a thousand swift boxes in there and they would never affect his maintenance, his engagement, his involvement or anything – so go for them.

When you were going down to Keyingham Marsh as a kid, there were no hedgerows. Charlie Leek planted all of those big A-frame hedgerows all the way down Cherry Cob, and they’re great – really good shade… they are there to shoot pheasant over. He’s a big shooter. They have a rabbit net bottom to stop them chewing them out at one side and getting into the field… berry-wise, there’s no function because he cuts them every year… what the compromise is on that location – obviously because you can’t get to them – is on the floodbank is a lot of self-set Hawthorn, which just grows as a straggler, and it’s full of berries. So what you have is a summer insect corridor, and then a berry winter corridor, and this has come about because Charlie has done this, and because he likes shooting. So a lot of farmers see pheasants or partridge as wildlife. And then they say their cover crops help small birds – which they do. But, other crops – and partridge, pheasant, which get run over in big numbers, are like McDonald’s – there’s no habitat with it – it’s a fast fix, it’s a £2 burger. So – buzzards are spreading and increasing in numbers – there are loads of them. There’s loads of roadkill. And birds of prey are increasing on these pheasant numbers and roadkill. But also, foxes are increasing.

M

So there’s a kind of, somewhat engineered cascade – a trophic cascade there I suppose? And if you’re maybe overaccommodating one species you’re bringing others in by necessity…

A

But most farmers won’t want additional foxes. They might not know why… they just don’t want them. The other shifting baseline - you might have seen on Sunk [Island] in the last 40 years – there never used to be any Roe Deer. There was just about no Roe Deer in East Yorkshire. They are now there in significant numbers. And down an Kilnsea you might see herds of 17-20 Roe Deer. And what’s the impact of that? If you realise that there are no predators to the deer… to the farming sector, if we said “We need a deer predator, what shall we bring in? Shall we bring Lynx in?” the response would be “What about all the sheep?” But how many farms have sheep? It’s almost being offended on somebody else’s behalf. Concerned on behalf of somebody else. You’ve decided you have an unconscious bias against that change.

M

I’ve been reading a little bit on rewilding and I would imagine that maybe in places where wildcats for example have been reintroduced, you’re not just looking at sparse green fields with the odd sheep around up there in the Cairngorms maybe, didn’t sorts of configurations are flourishing that might seem slightly less familiar but actually a better representation of a ‘natural’ state? It’s a good question – how much impact would the lynx have… if we’re struggling with the deer population then what better solution? And at another level, they’re a very charismatic animal and I imagine a really engaging sort of component to introduce to the landscape for children and a way in to really thinking deeply about what we consider native or non-native.

A

There was a project a while ago called ‘Tooth and Claw’ and it was set in Scotland, and it involved taking pictures of Scottish animals and it was a precursor to ideas around reintroduction… I’m not a huge fan of the word ‘rewilding’. It has the power to switch people off – to switch farmers off. It’s about looking forward, and the way you articulate that – language I think is so important. But this project was somewhere I would consider had a sympathetic audience, it was like a game fair, but a conservation fair. And some guys there had a table-top picture book and they were turning the pages of the book now and again – I didn’t realise to begin with, and they would move through images. So it might have started with an image of a fox cub, and then they would turn it to another image and it would be a snarling fox. And this would bring about two totally different reactions. While I was stood there a lady came over and looked at the snarling fox picture, and said “there are too many of them.” And the guy said “right – but how many should there be?’. She said “Well I don’t know, but there are too many.” So he was like “how do you know there are too many if you don’t know how many there should be?”. So her response was that “well, I don’t know but they just kill everything,” and so on, but that stuck with me. You know, what images do we use to convey the message we want to communicate? Do we use a Constable painting of a landscape of somewhere else back in time… what does the new landscape look like?

I was in Sunk Island church for one of their heritage open days, and there was a picture, an oil painting, on the wall and it had a sea of yellow in front of the church – it was about 1940’s – and someone said “wow - look at all that oilseed rape”, and somebody else said “they didn’t grow oilseed rape back then – that’s mustard.” And just because it was yellow you assumed it’s what we grow now. The difference is that on that day there was somebody there to correct it, who lived it, breathed it… it just changes the narrative, and there is the shifting baseline.