Taxpayers forking out to restore the hayfields

The things we children took for granted. Draughton was then a small village between Skipton and Ilkley, on the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales with six individual farms, one shop, no pub, not a lot of houses, scampering kids and luscious hayfields – in what we now know were golden years on the farm.

The horses were making way for tractors. Pitchforks and rakes rode with us on the trailer to the fields. Mechanisation and cropping subsidies were years away. The organics movement had little need to be worried.

Here at least it was a natural progression, or so it seemed. The abundant birds and wild flowers and bees and definable seasons were taken for granted.

That was then. Now land keepers and farmers and botanists and the bird-n-bee people are scrabbling to resuscitate what’s gone. Or, at worst, hang on to what’s left.

Fertilisers and subsidies and yields and grazing patterns played their part in agricultural improvement to increase hay crops to produce more winter feed for stock.

“A balance is needed, and quite small variations can bring a quick change for the worse”, says Don Gamble, the Hay Time project manager for the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust.

“Practices such as fertiliser and herbicide application, drainage, ploughing and reseeding with high productivity rye grasses, reduce the species richness of old meadows. Sadly, almost everywhere traditional management has fallen into disuse and the rich, colourful floras of old meadows replaced with repetitive, species-poor, grasslands of little wildlife or landscape value dominated by a few common plants.

“Such changes began long ago in the late 18th century but, since the Second World War, they have greatly intensified and the UK now has less than three per cent of the hay meadows there once were.”

A field of ordinary grasses is not going to attract the fauna that a flora-rich meadow will entice. Meadows are now being reseeded with a richer mix of species.

Traditional animal grazing routines are encouraged and stock taken off meadows in May to let the herbage grow. Haymaking follows in July or August. Stock return to the field to graze. In winter, they eat the harvested crop. Low levels of farmyard manure and occasional light dressings of lime are applied to help maintain fertility and a neutral soil pH.

The downside at the cash register is a lower yield at baling or silage time and a disruption to “modern” high-yield systems. The answer to that is a subsidy, from our taxes, which leaves participating farmers usually no worse off, while those that provide the species-rich seed crop can make a profit. Result: magnificent fields of mixed grasses and flowering plants.

It’s a Thursday morning in Littondale, a branch valley into upper Wharfedale and, as my childhood friend and Draughton farmer, John Turner, used to say, it’s siling down.

Christa Perry is swathed in the modern equivalent of oilskins – rain-proof synthetics – and is making a stooped walk of inspection across a meadow which was re-seeded last year.

The Sheffield University ecology graduate is the Hay Time project officer with the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, a charity which exists to improve the Dales habitat for plants, animals and people.

Buttercups decorate my gum boots with an applique of wet yellow petals as I follow Christa in her zig-zag squelch across the meadow at Sawyersgarth, near the village of Litton. It is picture postcard stuff here, seemingly immune from the property developer or anyone else with bad taste. Curlew and lapwing and oyster catcher sail in the air. Their are chookie eggs for sale in an honesty box at the roadside: £1.30 for six or £2.50 for 12.

Green fells and blue screes rise either side of the sloshing Skirfare, taking its waters to the Wharfe. It’s grand. It truly is. The reseeding work does so much to enhance the ecology. More insects mean more birds – surely the most charming of our wildlife, waking us in the morning with a song or a croak, and serenading the world at dusk.

Christa is making notes under a waterproof screen for her pad, ticking off new species since the seeding last year of the croft, using mown hay from a meadow across the road. New arrivals include sweet vernal grass, pignut and yellow rattle – a good transition.

Before the resuscitation, it was like the croft over the wall – short grass without much diversity of species, one of those typical farm pastures where you may see hens or a pony.

We move down the road to Blue Scar Farm, nearer Arncliffe. There are two fields here, reseeded last year, measuring 3.8ha or 9.4 acres (one hectare is 2.47 acres).

Christa joined the YDMT in 2009. Her CV includes work as a mounted forest keeper in Epping Forest and Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust’s wildlife sites officer, so she knows her stuff.

With her in the meadow walk is Stephen Mason, a volunteer on the Hay Time project for the last couple of years. He is based in Hertfordshire where he runs his own nature conservation business.

He’s got eyes like an red tailed kite, well, not quite, but he can spot miniature plants in the dense thatch. New species this year include lady’s mantle, eyebright, meadow vetchling and autumn hawkbit – mostly names which mean nothing to many of us but which make up a richer habitat.

A landowner or farmer could regenerate crofts into meadows without outside help, using available hay seed or acquiring it from a neighbour, and some do.

The process involves taking a mowing and then having it spread expertly on to a prepared field – without the back-up disciplines and surveying from the YDMT or similar organisations, but funding is still available through stewardship schemes.

Payments are, indeed, necessary for all but the gentleman farmer. Blue Scar is farmed by Mike McKenzie.

“I have to say that this plan seriously diminishes the viability of the enterprise by reducing the amount of stock the farm can support,” he says. “So the payments from the scheme are central to it being viable for me to enter into it.

“The stock reductions are two fold – reduced fertility and restrictive stocking rates on some fields being set out in the agreement.

“These restrictions are mainly in May, June and July and are to help wild flowers and ground-nesting birds”, adds Mike, whose day job is running a flight-training centre at Leeds Bradford airport.

His family has been farming in Littondale since 1896 and he was a full-time farmer from leaving school, in 1976, until 1999.

This change involved reducing stock and farming more traditionally – and overlapped training to be a helicopter instructor.

The hay meadow regeneration is part of this whole-farm plan. In the last 10 years, 40,000 native trees have been planted and some 1,100 yards of walls have been rebuilt on the 850-acre farm.

Cattle have returned to limestone pastures after an absence of 10 years.

“Their presence over sheep helps with the flowering of wild flowers. Some areas have had periods of total stock exclusion to promote heather regeneration – with a great deal of success,” says Mike.

The result? Splendid.

The money in the long grass

An annual payment of £200 per hectare is paid to the farmer for the restoration with all reseeding costs met through capital work payment.

Donors are paid £505/ha for species-rich green hay.

The YDMT has joined with the Nidderdale AONB to introduce hay meadow seeding on eligible Nidderdale farms.

A demonstration is being held there next Saturday, July 16. Booking essential: Tel 01423 712950 or [email protected]

Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust: Old Post Office, Clapham. Tel 015242 51002 and www.ydmt.org