Farmers know best when it comes to making biodiversity gains - Andy Brown

In Britain we have lost more of our natural landscape than in any other part of Europe apart from Iceland.

Most of our children will never hear a nightingale and if declines continue at the current pace then they also will not be able to hear the haunting cry of a curlew. The sight of leaping salmon becomes rarer each year as rivers that were once recovering from industrial pollution suffer under heavy loads of fertiliser run off and diseases spread from farmed fish.

There is no longer any need to stop a car and clean insects off the window during a long journey. The majority of the insects have gone and with them the wildlife that fed off them. Our trees are suffering from diseases casually imported to save a little money on cultivating new stocks in Britain.

Efforts are, of course, being made to try and rectify this. Huge planting programmes are increasing tree cover and there is a much increased awareness of the need for enhanced biodiversity.

Indeed, well meaning schemes to pay farmers for environmental net gain are under trial in several parts of Yorkshire and are about to become standard practice. Once the relevant government department works out how to organise the scheme properly and gets round to telling farmers what the rules for the payments are.

Those schemes are badly needed. Because the landscape that so many of us admire in places like the Yorkshire Dales is not remotely natural and is seriously depleted. Bare hillsides that have been nibbled down by sheep provide amazing long distance views that most of us have come to know and love. What we are actually looking at resembles the Brazilian rainforest after the trees have gone.

Even at some of the highest points in our Yorkshire landscape it is possible to see small stands of trees and a few places can still be found where low scrubby trees survive in corners where the sheep couldn’t eat fresh saplings.

The increasingly popular trend to increase the tree cover in our countryside is a genuinely effective way to provide greater opportunities for wildlife in Yorkshire. It is not always a great way to provide food. That puts us at risk of living in a very nice theme park whilst we eat food imported from cut down rainforests. It is really important that significant reforestation of our land takes place. It is also important that it does so in ways that help us to maintain food supplies.

For me that means planting high proportions of productive fruit and nut trees and doing so in light enough densities to permit animals to graze beneath the trees. It also means taking great care over exactly what farmers are incentivised to do by subsidies and not paying people to plant dense concentrations of supposedly native trees inside plastic guards with insufficient thought about the condition of that overcrowded woodland in 20 years time.

The people who most understand how this change can be most effectively achieved are our farmers. It is really important that they are a real force in the design of schemes that deliver the improvements in biodiversity that most of the public want the subsidies that they pay for to achieve.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Andy Brown is a Craven District Councillor representing Aire Valley with Lothersdale and the Green Party North Yorkshire Councillor for Aire Valley.