Scotland needs a new vision for prime agricultural land

The licences were issued by the Government to protect “prime agricultural land”. It is claimed, rightly or wrongly, that these animals could not be accommodated, even with mitigation, within the current farming system on much of this land.

The complex web of flood banks, drainage pipes and ditches that make farming possible on these low-lying former wetlands and floodplains, apparently just cannot withstand the presence of burrowing and dam-building beavers without “significant loss” of productive farmland.

I found myself wondering, what is this farming, which is evidently so important to Scotland that it justifies (in the eyes of the Government) such slaughter of this recently returned species, known to create wildlife habitat and provide ecosystem services much needed by humanity in the current climate, biodiversity and pollutions crises?

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The NFUS has worked hard to make translocation of beavers difficult and shooting easy, and has been treated, on the whole, very supportively by government and its nature agency NatureScot, because of the importance to the nation of this farming.

The main argument the NFUS has for justifying the support of farmers by government and society is this: farmers grow our food. Where would we be without them?

The low arable land, the best land in Scotland, probably could grow a fair percentage of our daily diet, but does it?

If you look at the NFUS website to see what arable crops are grown in Scotland, you will find that barley is the main one. Of the 459,400 ha of arable crops and oilseed rape grown in Scotland in 2019, well over half (287,000 ha) was barley. Barley is not something generally eaten directly by people.

The website goes on to say this: “The main cereal crop in Scotland is barley and 28% of the UK’s barley area is in Scotland. 35% of it goes into malting. 55% goes for animal feed. There are two types of barley: winter barley is sown in the autumn and spring barley is sown in March or April. 80% of the Scottish crop is spring barley. Milling wheats grown in Scotland are mainly used for biscuit making. Wheat is also used in distilling and for animal feed.”

It is true that nutritious food such as potatoes and carrots also feature in a smaller way, and raspberries and strawberries, and oil seed rape, and a few other vegetables. For those farmers who produce healthy food, especially those who grow it in an organic, regenerative and wildlife-friendly way, we should all have nothing but the highest admiration. Farming is a difficult job.

But it turns out that the majority of what our farmers are growing on this prime agricultural land is either for alcohol or livestock feed. If you add the percentage of rye, wheat and potatoes that go for alcohol to the figure for malting barley, the total of the Scottish arable crop that gets made into booze must be nudging up to half. And a fair amount of the rest is made into biscuits and crisps.

When feeding barley to cattle, at least 4/5th of the calories are lost in translation. So, while barley may ultimately contribute to producing an excellent food product (if you are a meat eater), no-one would argue that growing barley to feed to cattle is a sensible and efficient way to use the prime agricultural land, if your aim is to feed the nation.

Scotch whisky is a great product of course, but is it food? And do people feel that the production of an alcoholic drink justifies the killing of legally protected wildlife? The distilling industry also produces animal feed (particularly for cattle) as a by-product of alcohol manufacture.

In Scotland, whisky and beef production seem to be closely aligned and perhaps to some extent beef production could be seen as a by-product of the whisky industry in general. NFUS president Martin Kennedy told me recently that the straw from the barley is used to bed cattle in winter. He also pointed out that whisky brings a lot of money to the UK Treasury which helps to fund the NHS.

Undoubtedly alcohol production is not a popular land use with everyone in Scotland when its social costs are borne in mind. On learning that a whole field of wheat was to be made into gin, an observer once commented: “I’m sorry, but all I see is a field of domestic violence.”

No wonder the NHS needs so much funding… Beavers with their wetland-creating, wildlife-enhancing capacities clearly don’t fit well with current farming methods on the low-lying land, but it raises the question of whether farming should change rather than killing (or moving) all the beavers in these places.

To avoid system collapse, revival of essential natural processes – the slowing of floods, the maintenance of groundwater, the sequestration of carbon, the absorption of pollutants, the restoration of pollinator habitat and food – is all becoming critical.

These processes are needed along the whole river catchment – and prime agricultural land in the lower reaches of our rivers should not be permanently exempt from change just because it is so designated. After all, for these natural processes to function well, connectivity is essential, and the most intensive farming in particular should have functioning buffer zones next to waterways to help protect water quality, biodiversity and other essential river ecosystem services.

While all farmed products may be valuable to our economy, we would not starve without most of them. We might miss the whisky and the steak, but these are hardly staples. Potatoes are another matter, but they only represent around 6% of our arable land (27,400 ha). And I am reliably informed that growing potatoes at field scale in Scotland is very difficult to do in a regenerative way. Scottish soils, mostly dropped by glaciers at the end of the ice age, tend to be stony and need to be de-stoned for mechanical harvesting. This does not lend itself well to sustainable ‘min till’ or ‘no till’ farming.

Current intensive farming, with its large, hedgeless fields, deep ploughing, often right up to the edge of the waterways, and heavy use of agro-chemicals, is hard to reconcile with long-term care of the soil and avoidance of diffuse pollution.

Diffuse pollution – which the SEPA maps record as being particularly prevalent in some prime agricultural areas of Scotland - is the kind which comes from whole fields rather than from a single source such as a factory or sewage outlet. Where people live next to these arable fields, they often see the wind blow topsoil off or watch their local burn run brown when it rains.

Much of the prime topsoil is being lost by current farming methods that leave the earth, worked to a light tilth, bare throughout the winter (spring barley growing being an example). Some of this soil is washed down rivers and can cause the death of fish, not just in the river, but out to sea as well. Nitrate and phosphate run-off from fertilisers can cause algal blooms – they also kill fish by starving them of oxygen and killing the insects on which they feed.

Large swathes of farmland in Central and East Scotland are classed as “nitrate-vulnerable zones”, already containing excessive levels of chemicals which end up as pollutants in watercourses. Siltation can contribute to downstream flooding in nearby towns and villages. Beavers, by contrast, can help to reduce many of these negative impacts, but beavers are not being integrated into low-lying agricultural land. They are being shot or moved away.

Very little of what happens on farms is the fault of individual farmers. They are part of a much bigger system – forced to deal with large capital costs and overdrafts, pressure from government, global corporations, machinery and chemical companies, supermarkets, food brokers and banks. Financial pressures build and perverse subsidies nudge them in an ecologically unsustainable direction. All this may make environmental concerns seem obscure and idealistic.

But as global average temperatures crank up year by year and natural processes fail, questions are being asked about agriculture now that seem to undermine many of the assumptions of the last few centuries. Is ploughing a good idea at all? Should earth in fields ever be left bare or should cover crops be grown?

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Is eating meat sustainable? Is drainage a good idea or should we be conserving and recreating our lost wetlands? Can we combine arable agriculture with environmental conservation? Can we afford not to? (Loss of soils and pollinators will lead to the failure of much arable agriculture in any case).

Research is under way in the English fens on the use of wetland crops such as manna grass. Permaculturists are now developing ways of growing food in Scotland which can produce more food per hectare than arable farms, but without the harmful agro-chemicals or the soil disturbance. Can these be supported and expanded?

There are no easy or immediate answers, but farmers and their representative bodies, and all of society, need to be attempting to visualise something beyond the unsustainable status quo. If producing our food is a serious aim for Scottish farmers, then there needs to be a limit on the amount of prime agricultural land used for cash crops.

And if beavers can’t be tolerated under the present regime on this land, then maybe it’s time to re-examine that regime instead of removing the ecosystem engineers that are so desperately needed in this time of deepening crisis.