It’s a new variation on scratch’n’sniff. Four Hessian sacks full of grass, and you have to pick the one you’d offer to the sheep whose heart you’d like to win. I picked the one which was made from lowland grass in an improved meadow.
The trouble is that in this context the term improved is roughly the same as applied to improvements in train timetables. All the flowers had been abolished as a necessary step towards a more efficient nutritional enhancement of the lives of sheep. In other words it does the job, but lacks soul.
The four bags of hay were part of an exhibition at St John’s Chapel in Weardale on the History of Hay-Time, along with some rather barbaric looking instruments, which preceeded the days of tractors, and, lots of pictures of Edwardian haymakers looking seriously over-dressed.
It’s Hay Time in Teesdale, well almost. Just a few weeks to go and the stunning carpet of colours which make this landscape so spectacular at this time of year will have been cut, turned, dried and baled into a food-store for winter. Weather permitting that is.
The North Pennines has a patchwork of flower rich hay meadows which are rare in the British Countryside these days. When it comes to the most valuable `species rich’ examples, there is just two thousand acres of them left in the whole of the UK.
And these meadows are a haven for some of the rarest plants in the land, such as Eyebright, Great Burnet, Bistort and Pignut and Lady’s Mantle. All of these were to be found in a field I visited with John O’Reilly from the Haytime project which is run by the North Pennine Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty team, think of an AONB as a sort of National Park `lite’. This gently sloping field close to the River Tees is a treasure trove of rare, precious and largely unspectacular looking plants which grow here and in very few other places.
The grass and the flowers grow here because the farmer is paid to take his sheep and cattle off this land at the end of March. The flowers, and the grass is then untroubled by teeth for at least three months before it is harvested. By the beginning of June, yellow, white, mauve and green jostle for the eye’s attention. By the end of July it’s gone, felled, and left on the ground to dry, being every day to make sure that happens.
But nothing ever goes smoothly in farming, and the curse of haytime is rain. Hay, as opposed to Silage is a dry feed. If it’s wet when it’s baled it can go rotten and could make the animals which eat it ill. So at the end of June and into July the farmers pray for sunshine, and have to move fast before it disappears, hence the old saying making hay while the sun shines.
The trouble is that in this context the term improved is roughly the same as applied to improvements in train timetables. All the flowers had been abolished as a necessary step towards a more efficient nutritional enhancement of the lives of sheep. In other words it does the job, but lacks soul.
The four bags of hay were part of an exhibition at St John’s Chapel in Weardale on the History of Hay-Time, along with some rather barbaric looking instruments, which preceeded the days of tractors, and, lots of pictures of Edwardian haymakers looking seriously over-dressed.
It’s Hay Time in Teesdale, well almost. Just a few weeks to go and the stunning carpet of colours which make this landscape so spectacular at this time of year will have been cut, turned, dried and baled into a food-store for winter. Weather permitting that is.
The North Pennines has a patchwork of flower rich hay meadows which are rare in the British Countryside these days. When it comes to the most valuable `species rich’ examples, there is just two thousand acres of them left in the whole of the UK.
And these meadows are a haven for some of the rarest plants in the land, such as Eyebright, Great Burnet, Bistort and Pignut and Lady’s Mantle. All of these were to be found in a field I visited with John O’Reilly from the Haytime project which is run by the North Pennine Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty team, think of an AONB as a sort of National Park `lite’. This gently sloping field close to the River Tees is a treasure trove of rare, precious and largely unspectacular looking plants which grow here and in very few other places.
The grass and the flowers grow here because the farmer is paid to take his sheep and cattle off this land at the end of March. The flowers, and the grass is then untroubled by teeth for at least three months before it is harvested. By the beginning of June, yellow, white, mauve and green jostle for the eye’s attention. By the end of July it’s gone, felled, and left on the ground to dry, being every day to make sure that happens.
But nothing ever goes smoothly in farming, and the curse of haytime is rain. Hay, as opposed to Silage is a dry feed. If it’s wet when it’s baled it can go rotten and could make the animals which eat it ill. So at the end of June and into July the farmers pray for sunshine, and have to move fast before it disappears, hence the old saying making hay while the sun shines.
Last year the North Pennines escaped lightly when the skies unleashed a torrent of water on rural England. However it seriously disrupted the haymaking. The result is that the farmers have to use other methods of preserving the food. Silage is moist grass which is sealed into either silos or wrapped in plastic, where it ferments; producing acid which `pickles’ the grass, and stops it rotting. Another variation in Haylage, a relatively recent innovation where grass with a moisture content of about 50%, as opposed to about 20% for Hay, is wrapped in plastic and partially ferments.
Anyway, what makes hay really important for conservationists and botanists is that in an ideal world, as the grass and the cut flowers lay on the ground drying out, seeds are released as the hay is turned, thus refreshing the meadows.
Infact in some places, hay from flower rich meadows is brought to `improved’ land and dried there in an effort to `un-improve’ or restore these fields.
So valuable are these hay meadows considered by conservationists that they lobbied long and hard for the government to introduce a system to pay farmers to manage them for conservation.
In 1987 Environmentally Sensitive Area Payments were introduced to stop the loss of these habitats. Under the agreements farmers were required to remove their livestock from these fields by the end of March, the meadows could not be cut until the end of July, and artificial fertiliser was banned.
Although the schemes went some way to revitalising the upland meadows, farmers found them inflexible and the ESA agreements are now coming to an end. They are to be replaced by what it so endearingly called the Higher Level Scheme. The idea is that you, the farmer, draw up a series of nature conservation measures, and you agree them with Natural England who will then pay you money for implementing them. The first problem, which has apparently now been solved was that there wasn’t nearly enough money to fund the same level of conservation as before under the old ESA payments.
Now the difficulty lies with staffing. Because all of these `Higher Level’ agreements are individually tailored to each farm, the staff input is much higher, and there aren’t enough staff to go around. There is a real fear amongst those trying to halt the decline of hay meadows that farmers will find they have to wait to get onto the scheme, whilst they’re losing money on unproductive meadows which stand empty of stock for long periods of time, and go back to the old flower-free ways.
The worry is that if the species rich hay meadows are lost, they’re lost for good.
Anyway, what makes hay really important for conservationists and botanists is that in an ideal world, as the grass and the cut flowers lay on the ground drying out, seeds are released as the hay is turned, thus refreshing the meadows.
Infact in some places, hay from flower rich meadows is brought to `improved’ land and dried there in an effort to `un-improve’ or restore these fields.
So valuable are these hay meadows considered by conservationists that they lobbied long and hard for the government to introduce a system to pay farmers to manage them for conservation.
In 1987 Environmentally Sensitive Area Payments were introduced to stop the loss of these habitats. Under the agreements farmers were required to remove their livestock from these fields by the end of March, the meadows could not be cut until the end of July, and artificial fertiliser was banned.
Although the schemes went some way to revitalising the upland meadows, farmers found them inflexible and the ESA agreements are now coming to an end. They are to be replaced by what it so endearingly called the Higher Level Scheme. The idea is that you, the farmer, draw up a series of nature conservation measures, and you agree them with Natural England who will then pay you money for implementing them. The first problem, which has apparently now been solved was that there wasn’t nearly enough money to fund the same level of conservation as before under the old ESA payments.
Now the difficulty lies with staffing. Because all of these `Higher Level’ agreements are individually tailored to each farm, the staff input is much higher, and there aren’t enough staff to go around. There is a real fear amongst those trying to halt the decline of hay meadows that farmers will find they have to wait to get onto the scheme, whilst they’re losing money on unproductive meadows which stand empty of stock for long periods of time, and go back to the old flower-free ways.
The worry is that if the species rich hay meadows are lost, they’re lost for good.
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