LOSING GROUND?
Wildlife flourishes alongside livestock at Yew Tree Farm near Bristol. But as the city struggles to provide housing for its growing population, farmer Catherine Withers faces losing her land to development. James Fair reports
Wildlife flourishes alongside livestock at Yew Tree Farm in Bristol, but as the city needs more land for housing, farmer Catherine Withers faces losing her land to development.
Piggy, piggy, piggies,” Catherine Withers calls as we wander back from the fields towards the farmhouse buildings. “Do they come when you call?” I ask, unnecessarily as it turns out, as seven or eight joyful bundles of perfect pinkness come running towards us like oversized puppies, as giddy as spring lambs in their excitement.
“Yes,” Catherine replies laughing. “Piggy, piggy, piggy, piggies,” she calls again, this time emphasising the final word in her bliss at seeing them happy and healthy. A latecomer comes lolloping across the muddy paddock, ears flopping like a spaniel’s, and starts to scratch itself against a well-used log. Of course, these pigs – Welsh whites, a rare breed renowned for being able to live outdoors all-year-round – are not pets, and in another six months or so, they’ll be sent to an abattoir to be slaughtered. A Bristol butcher will make sausages out of them, including ones flavoured with wild garlic that Catherine picks herself in the woodlands at the bottom of the farm, and she will deliver them to customers locally. Well, she’s a farmer – there’s no room for sentiment in this business.
There are also chickens (until recently free-range, now temporarily confined to barracks after the local fox took one a week
or so before I visit), and some 40 Hereford beef cattle roam the rough slopes that descend into a valley where the South Bristol link road cuts a noisy arc. Our conversation is momentarily crowded out by the deafening whines of an accelerating motorbike. It’s beautiful here, but not always peaceful.
But then this is a farm that is being enveloped by one of the UK’s fastest-growing cities. The view from the farm takes in the village of Long Ashton, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Bristol skyline, and it’s spectacular. From here, it’s just a hop, skip and jump to the edge of the city, and yet we watch a kestrel hovering high overhead and swallows weaving their magical flight paths closer to the ground.
THE LAST FARM
On her Facebook page, Catherine promotes Yew Tree Farm as “Bristol’s last working farm” and sells a range of organic pork and eggs, plus seasonal jams and chutneys (the beef is sold in Waitrose). It’s the perfect antidote to what she calls the “stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” model – tasty food produced to high welfare standards with negligible food miles – exactly what the green lobby would have farmers do. Despite being vegetarian for the past 30 years,
“Skylarks nest in the hay meadow, swallows in the barns and dippers live on the brook”
I found her organic meat irresistible. And the farm is a haven for wildlife. Skylarks nest in the hay meadow, swallows in her barns and dippers live on Colliter’s Brook. “And a kingfisher – everyone says they’ve seen it, except for me,” says Catherine ruefully.
Brambles intrude into the cattle pastures like the tide lapping away at the shore, and the hedges – mainly hawthorn and blackthorn –
have grown to the size of two-storey houses, unrecognisable as hedges you usually find in the countryside. There are several heartstoppingly magnificent oaks, and one equally magnificent dead one. All this leads to a “wildlife hotspot within the city of Bristol that needs to be recognised,” Tim Curley of Avon Wildlife Trust wrote in an email to Catherine last year.
But it’s not. The council has prepared a draft local plan that has designated about five hectares of the land Catherine rents privately – including her wildlife-rich hay meadow with its precious skylarks – as ripe for development, reducing, at a stroke, her holding of some 24 hectares by 20%. If the plan goes through as it is, 200 houses will abut her farm, destroying her ability to make her own hay and bringing hundreds more people – and their dogs – on to the rights of way that criss-cross the land.
The consequence will be to make farming here unviable, she says. We watch as a woman and a large dog enter the field. “I know that lady,” she says. “Her dog’s crazy, she can’t let it off the lead, but she does sometimes. I’ve had to speak to her about it – it could definitely threaten one of our newborn calves.”
And then there’s the rubbish – Catherine patrols her fields every day, and never comes back without something for the bin. We find the embers of a small fire, plus discarded drink cans and sandwich wrappers and collect enough to half-fill a bin bag. She’s had dog-poo bags hung on trees, although posting on Facebook and, honestly, programmes such as Countryfile help to stop this sort of behaviour.
Catherine’s anger and frustration at the predicament she finds herself in comes burning through as we talk. Referring to the hay meadow, she points out that elsewhere in the
UK, landowners are being paid to create identical pollinator-friendly habitats. “There’s all this money available in grants, but if you have already got it, the attitude seems to be, ‘Well, that can go!’ It’s mental.”
Yew Tree Farm has been in the family since Catherine’s grandfather took over the tenancy in the mid-1960s. The Withers family has been farming in the area for at least 120 years, but they have been pushed further and further out as Bristol has expanded. Now, only this farm is left within the boundaries of the city, though her father and cousins still have holdings in Long Ashton, which is in North Somerset.
Now aged 51, Catherine has lived almost all her life at Yew Tree, and even as a girl of 10 took responsibility for some of the livestock. After taking her A-levels, she tried her hand at intensive pig farming, but found it souldestroying and unviable. “I made £25 a week,” she recalls. Though she has done a variety of other jobs, she’s always been involved with the livestock in one way or another. “The place drew me back all the time,” she says.
PLANNING DILEMMA
Bristol City Council said in a statement that the draft local plan from 2019 does propose to
“Yew Tree Farm should be a beacon for nature and wildlife. Bristol should be proud of it”
develop land at Yew Tree Farm for 200 new houses, but added that “since then, the declaration of an ecological emergency has given renewed urgency to the need to conserve and enhance habitats”. The council won’t support “proposals where the benefits of new housing would be outweighed by losses of important habitats”, it added. When I show it to Catherine, she responds, “Do you think they are softening?”