Country Diary

A switch to dairy farming means the redrawing of boundaries in every sense, but new priorities don’t have to be a barrier to conservation

It’s the field boundaries that define this farm more than anything. That sounds obvious but, of course, to my share farming partners it’s the land in between the hedges and walls that makes the money and the boundaries are just cost.

It’s a bit of grit that has worn holes in the landlord and tenant relationship for centuries, I suspect. And to the wildlife that shares this land with us, the boundaries are everything — nesting sites in wall crevices and hedges, food and corridors for safe passage.

So re-fencing the whole farm this year has been a challenge for a variety of reasons and not just financially and logistically. It has been a fulfilling exercise and made me see nooks and crannies that I had overlooked and appreciate them all the more. And, inevitably, there have been some tough decisions, balancing conservation value against potential milk in the tank.

The Government’s environmental schemes, well-meaning as they are, have not compensated us for lots of the nesting habitat I was happy to leave around field margins under our old mixed farming system.

In fact, perversely, I have often been penalised and had subsidy taken off me for being a bit too relaxed about allowing the jungle to encroach. But now it’s either one side of a fence and left to Mother Nature or t’other side and liable to be grazed by a dairy cow.

I hope we have reached a good compromise but it will weigh on my conscience. There are winners and losers. I hope we will no longer find roe deer with broken legs where they have misjudged their jumps and got caught in the top two strands of barb. For hares and other animals the absence of sheep netting must seem most liberating.

It’s been a trying few months as the new paddock grazing system started before we had the fences to seal the paddocks properly and we are all heartily sick of disentangling reels of temporary electric fence where a mob of heifers has trailed it.

Often some primal instinct, no doubt inherited from their aurochs ancestors, has taken them into woodland, which has made for some amusing social media photographs, but meant that I have had to assemble a team of beaters on occasions to flush them out. And who knew that if the power is off for a minute, a Jersey Holstein heifer’s favourite snack is plastic electric fencing wire?

“Who knew that a Jersey Holstein heifer’s favourite snack is electric fencing wire?”

Timeless rural truths

Our local community has been endlessly long-suffering and kind, but I suspect the novelty of running down roads to turn cattle is starting to wear a bit thin.

The poet Robert Frost’s line – ‘good fences make good neighbours’ – is ever at the back of my mind. Frost’s great poem, Mending Wall, has many other timeless rural truths in it and as I look at our tumbledown dykes, I am reminded of his lines from New Hampshire in 1914: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

It is a labour of love to maintain them, particularly as they no longer serve an agricultural purpose. It is the single strand of high-tensile wire with 7,000 volts passing through it that will keep the cattle in, not the stones lovingly crafted into a wall, bleached with age and blotched with white and yellow lichens. And, in fact, we have had to put a wire up each side of the dykes to keep the cattle off them. But that was the same with Frost:

There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

It would be the work of a moment to remove them and the digger drivers are itching to scrape them up and cart the stone for hardcore. And the temptation is there, but Frost was wrong. Something there is that does love a wall.

Jamie Blackett farms in Galloway. He runs a small private shoot and was one of the founders of the Dumfriesshire & Stewartry Foxhounds.

Maintaining the walls is a labour of love, as whilst they look good they fail to restrain the cattle