Moor money
In this extract from Ian Coghill’s new book Moorland Matters, the author argues passionately for the economic case for preserving grouse shooting
If we look at the economics of my moorland, each ewe will have an average of 1.5 lambs worth £40 each in the market. So each ewe can produce £60 income. You can have one sheep on four acres of moor without doing damage to the land. You can have a pair of grouse on four acres and they average six or seven young. Their value is from £80 to £100 per bird each. For a thousand acres of moorland you can earn £15,000 from sheep, or £120,000 from grouse.
On a well-farmed moor, grouse provide a much better return. In addition, whereas for 1,000 ewes you need one full-time worker, you need a full-time worker for every 500 brace of grouse. Because grouse produce such a good return, you employ more staff and they have families and live locally.
Cattle are less profitable than sheep due to the overheads such as silage, sheds, machinery. However, cattle improve the land for ground-nesting birds including curlew, lapwing, woodcock. Cattle work brilliantly as part of an integrated system.”
Farmer and landowner, North Yorkshire
“Grouse shooting occurs on some of the poorest land in Britain, so the question becomes whether driven grouse shooting is the best use of this land in economic terms. This is a hard question to answer because, while grouse shooting survives only because of private investment, farming and forestry survive only because of public investment.
The wider environmental damage (in terms of erosion, downstream flooding and acidification) caused by these three activities is much less from grouse shooting than from hill farming or forestry, but clearly varies between areas... Much of the private income that goes into grouse shooting enters the local economy, supporting people in some remote areas where alternative employment is scarce. This includes not only people involved in grouse management, but those working in hotels and other local businesses.
Grouse shooting and other game shooting undoubtedly attracts some people to the uplands when other visitors are scarce, and further adds to the cash flow from the city to the countryside.”
Ian Newton OBE, former chairman of the RSPB in Uplands and Birds (2020)
Another contentious issue is the economic impact of grouse shooting and grouse moor management. The opponents dismiss the idea that grouse shooting has any economic significance by pointing to the self-evident fact that, whatever contribution it makes, it can only ever be trivial on a national scale because of the vast size of Britain’s economy.
While this is true, it is also pointless, as the same could be said for myriad small and medium-sized businesses. Individually each is of only local significance, but together they make up one of the key drivers of a successful economy. None, including grouse shooting, should be destroyed on a prejudiced whim. The economic impact of grouse moor management is essentially local, but that arguably makes it more important rather than less. More than almost any other business, the money from grouse shooting comes into the immediate locality and stays there.
Let us compute a typical day. Nine people shooting and a bag of 100 brace. This will cost them £180 plus VAT per brace, so the estate will receive £18,000 and the taxman £3,600. In addition, the shooters will pay for loaders, who will get £90 to £110 each. They will also tip the keepers around £100. Thus the total funds going directly into the estate and its full and part-time employees is around £20,000. The Guns would normally stay in a local hotel on the nights before and after shooting, so if we take a conservative estimate of £200 a night for dinner and accommodation, then add in the drinks bill, you are probably near to £5,000. Thus, only one day’s driven grouse shooting has injected £25,000 into the local economy.
The high cost of driven grouse shooting is not simply a result of demand exceeding
“A day’s grouse shooting injects £25,000 into the local economy”
supply. There are a lot of people to pay. There are the beaters who walk miles across the moors trying to get the grouse to fly over the butts, the pickers-up who bring their dogs to collect the shot birds, and many others, who all have to be paid for their day’s work.
Most importantly there is also the endless day-to-day management, which obviously includes the full-time keepering staff, but also a wide range of local businesses and craftsmen. So the money goes round and round a largely closed loop within the community. This, it must be remembered, is just one day.
In a good year, when the grouse have bred well and there is a good harvestable surplus. On a large moor there may be many days, each one contributing similar amounts to the local economy. If there are 100 days like this, spread over all the moors in a dale – and there may well be more in a good year – that is £2.5 million flowing into the local community.
But this is only the direct economic benefit and the easiest to compute. The income from the shooting and the direct costs of the keepers and contractors and rents and fees is only the tip of a financial iceberg whose scale is almost impossible to calculate. To the obvious, elements must be added other important layers of value and worth. How much are hundreds of curlew, lapwing and redshank worth? What is the value of the landscape, the privately maintained public access, the enhanced quality of the retail and hospitality sector in remote locations that, without the grouse, would have difficulty keeping a shop open?
How can a value be put on the human health benefits of eradicating toxic bracken and reducing the risks of a lethal tick bite? Is anyone ever going to put a value on the ecosystem services the moors provide? The clean water, the carbon safely stored, the river flow modulation, even the well-being these magnificent places engender – all are literally priceless, but currently have no value. All are provided free by the people who manage the grouse moors at their own expense.
There is simply nothing that can replace this level of economic activity if it disappears. Most of the things that are suggested as alternatives already exist alongside grouse shooting. Grazing sheep and cattle and tourism would not increase in the absence of grouse moor management and might decline if traditional management were stopped. Forestry and wind turbines would generate income but all the regular money would go to the landowner. There would be a short period using peripatetic, specialist contractors, focused around construction and planting. There might be a burst of spending in the local hotels for a few months, and then nothing.
It is, of course, true that grouse shooting will not single-handedly save the nation’s economy. but it does make a significant contribution to the local economy where it occurs. That is essentially all we can ask of any business. What is more, the money that flows into these communities is private money, freely given and taxed.
It is not the public funds that keep the conservation industry’s efforts at moorland management afloat. Remember the scale of the alternative. A figure of £6 million to kill Orkney stoats, £6 million not to rid the Uists of hedgehogs, more than £3 million lottery money not to stop curlew, hen harriers, merlin and red grouse disappearing from Lake Vyrnwy. Millions to re-wet and re-vegetate moors that are now burned and blackened.
Perhaps the last words on the impact of grouse shooting and grouse moor management should go to Professor Simon Denny, formerly of the University of Northampton and co-author with Tracey Latham-Green of a report published last year on the impact of grouse shooting on moorland communities:
“Communities in areas where integrated moorland management, including grouse shooting, is practised have a more diverse economy, and are less reliant on tourism than comparable upland areas where land management practices do not include grouse shooting.
“The study concludes that integrated moorland management, including grouse shooting, results in a complex web of economic, social and intangible benefits that can have direct and indirect financial benefits,” Prof Denny wrote.