We still need to save our orchards
24/2/2023
At the moment, we are all beset by images of huge disasters like the continuing war in Ukraine and earthquakes in Turkey and Syria; horrors which, individually, we can do little to mitigate. And, last night, on Southeast News, environment correspondent Yvette Austin revealed another, less horrific, but nonetheless serious trend which will have important long-term consequences………….and which we can all do something about.
Yvette revealed that farmers in Kent, (and no doubt elsewhere) are grubbing up their orchards because they can no longer afford to use the ground in this way; the income they receive from sales simply does not cover rising costs. These include higher energy costs (cold storage for apples and pears is apparently expensive), and increasing costs of labour -partly caused, no doubt, by a scarcity of willing workers from Europe. And Yvette showed the sorry result: dismembered trunks lying in rows on the grass of large fields………….
This is truly serious for a number of reasons: it is hard for the individual farmer and his or her community -a loss of amenity and biodiversity. It does represent a loss of food security for Britain at a time when the current scarcity of certain vegetables shows how vulnerable we can be, and, more significantly, it goes against a trend which we desperately need to follow in the urgent context of the Climate and Biodiversity Crises. If the British Government cannot reverse the destruction of our orchards, all their vaunted aims of “Nett Zero” will be revealed as empty rhetoric.
There is a great need for agriculture in general to become much more sustainable; for extensive and intensive, (largely arable) farming, there is an urgent requirement to head towards a ‘regenerative’ agriculture. But for the generally smaller-scale fruit and livestock sectors there is an exciting chance to achieve that more sustainable future -by reinventing past traditions. We need agroforestry: the trees to sequester some carbon and provide us with fruit (or nuts), while sheep graze under them, accompanied by geese, ducks or hens. (The grazing needs to be managed, of course, and depending on the type/size of trees, cows and ponies could have spells under the trees, too). Left to age gently (unlike the unhappy trees in Kent) these new multi-purpose ‘paddocks with trees’ would become old orchards, exactly the sort of rich, exciting, beautiful, biodiverse places celebrated by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates in their wonderful book: ‘ORCHARD -A Year in England’s Eden’ -if you have not yet read it, do!
It is a tragic irony that while our British Government is celebrating its post-Brexit ‘opportunity’ to do what it wants, and while its own new policies are apparently intended to pay farmers for delivering environmental goods as well as food, we should watch mature orchards being grubbed out. This must stop.
What can we all do? Simple -as they say-write to the Government protesting about what is happening……..and stop buying imported apples from supermarkets!