Listen up, you might just learn something

Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary Thérèse Coffey that sometimes it pays to abide by local knowledge and customs

DEAR Thérèse, We once had an amateur weather forecaster in the constituency. Every day he would post his predictions for the ensuing 24 hours in the window of his shop and in the end he became quite celebrated for their accuracy.

He was frequently interviewed for newspapers and ascribed his skills to years of observing local weather conditions and thus amassing a huge database of signs and portents. All absolute tripe: his forecasts were accurate because they were noted down from the early morning ones put out by the BBC.

But sometimes genuine local knowledge deserves true respect, and never more so than in the matter of land management, an area so specialised (according to region and local climatic conditions) it cannot be learned from a book.

Which is not to stop some people from attempting to do so and then, from a position of authority, trying to apply the imperfect knowledge they have acquired.

Exmoor farmers have had to put up with quite a bit of this one way or another since the national park was set up nearly 80 years ago. They and their families have been farming the Exmoor hills for generations. Their management regimes have been honed, chamfered up and generally finely tuned.

Yet they have been plagued by the appearance of a long succession of paid ‘experts’ who have proceeded to tell them they are doing it all wrong, from the breeds of cattle they run to the timing of just about every farming operation you can name.

There have been several official attempts to impose new regimes, few of which have met with any success – though that has always been quietly forgotten, naturally. There was the introduction of Highland cattle. Surprise, surprise: it was too hot for them. And there was one particular bugbear of mine: the almost total interdiction of swaling, the process of burning off mature gorse and heather in spring to fertilise the soil, promote new growth for grazing livestock and reduce the risk of damaging summer fires.

No, Natural England muscled in and declared large-scale swaling was unnecessary – and polluting. The result was to create impressive stands of gorse a couple of metres tall which eventually had to be mechanically cut (using polluting hydrocarbon fuels) and carried away while doing nothing at all for grazing animals or soil quality.

But two things have now become apparent. Swaling got rid of plants that choked off those which provided food for the heath fritillary butterfly. Without the swaling those plants rampaged freely and the butterfly numbers collapsed.

It also interrupted the life cycle of ticks, keeping their numbers to reasonable levels – a particularly welcome function given that a human death from a tick bite was recorded on Exmoor at the end of last century.

As a result, tick numbers have exploded, threatening walkers and the dogs. But whereas before they were known for transmitting Lyme disease and so-called Q fever, the list has recently been extended to include louping ill in sheep and redwater fever in cattle – both potentially fatal.

So not only are there millions more ticks around as a result of the swaling ban, they are even more dangerous.

Well done, the experts!

I note swaling is suddenly back in fashion as part of moorland restoration projects, so there is some hope that we can start to build up the butterfly populations soon.

Depopulating the ticks, on the other hand, isn’t going to be so easy. Yours ever,

Ian

> Swaling is suddenly back in fashion as part of moorland restoration projects, says Ian