We need to talk about sheep. The unavoidable truth is that sheep are the principal obstacle standing in the way of meaningful nature recovery in Britain’s national parks and other agriculturally marginal landscapes. There is no getting around it, the sheep have got to go.
Britain is one of the least wild countries in Europe, principally because our uplands, once a great mosaic of wood pastures and Atlantic temperate rainforests, have been cleared of nature and people to make way for sheep. The grazing of tens of millions of sheep today ensures that, apart from small pockets, trees, scrub, wildflowers, and birdsong are largely absent from our uplands. Go and visit almost any of our national parks and you’ll see for yourself. You’ll find sheep everywhere you look.
It’s not just wildlife that loses out; sheep have a brutal impact on the hydrology of our landscapes. By compacting the soil and expunging vegetation, sheep-wrecked bare hillsides are simply unable to collect and store rainfall, making soil erosion, flash flooding, and seasonal drought far more frequent and more dramatic, costing the country billions each year.
Sheep are susceptible to a range of parasitic infestations and must be dipped in virulent chemical pesticides such as clikzin, turning them into walking toxic bombs which poison the soil and the invertebrates on which the whole web of life depends. Even maggots are unable to consume the carcass of a sheep that dies on the hillside, which they often do.
Sheep are not native to Britain. They come from the arid hills of Asia Minor. They suffer terribly in Britain, soaked through as they stand exposed out in the rain on our windy, wet hillsides. Their feet, so poorly equipped for our perpetually sodden ground that they’ve been likened to wearing stilettos at a festival, have a tendency to rot while the sheep is still alive. The fact that even the acorns from British oak trees are toxic to sheep says it all.
Some of us long for the return of Britain’s native apex predators, the lynx and the wolves. The loss of these carnivores from our wilder landscapes has triggered an explosion in the number of wild deer, which only exacerbates the effect of overgrazing in what should be our most vibrant landscapes. These predators pose no danger to people, and if it were not for sheep interests, these mysterious, marvellous animals would be back in a flash, as they are now in all of the countries of continental Europe.
Surprisingly, Britons don’t eat much lamb or mutton; more than 80 per cent of the sheep meat we produce is exported. There are however plenty of people who argue passionately that sheep are an important component in our national food security.
This is nonsense. Sheep tend to be raised on our least productive land, in areas not suitable to growing crops. There’s strong evidence to suggest that, if you consider winter feed which must be brought in from elsewhere, and the negative hydrological impact on more productive farmland, upland sheep farming is likely to be net negative in terms of actual food production.
In landscapes dominated by sheep, many of which fall within our national parks, the decline of nature has gone hand in hand with economic and social decline. Sheep farming is hopelessly non-viable in economic terms, incapable of providing a decent living to hard-working sheep-farming families. As the average age of sheep farmers creeps ever higher, their take-home income has crept ever lower.
In sheep farming, there are no winners. Of course, there are circumstances in which sheep are desirable. Sheep play an important role in the conservation of certain niche and precious cultural landscapes, and there is an ancient tradition of keeping pedigree sheep hefted in some areas of Britain, but the numbers were always far, far lower than they are today.
When Beatrix Potter moved to the Lake District in the nineteenth century there were perhaps half a million sheep across all of Britain; now there are an eye-popping 33 million of them. Wool is a brilliant alternative to synthetic materials for a range of uses, but we are so heavily oversupplied with it that wool prices have fallen virtually to zero. British-grown lamb, mutton and wool should be limited, niche, specialty, homegrown products to delight in. Not mass produced at the expense of great swathes of our countryside.
It was native cattle that were the dominant livestock in Britain until recent times, when sheep took their place. In Ireland, Wales and Scotland, it was the landowners who cleared the trees from the hills and the valleys for building navy ships, before clearing the people from the land in wave after wave of so-called clearances to make way for hordes of sheep. In many parts of Britain, the arrival of sheep was the single greatest cause of the loss of upland villages. This dark history makes the modern enthusiasm for sheep all the more perverse.
So why are Britain’s most beautiful landscapes crammed with sheep? The answer is that until recently, like all farming, the sheep industry has been propped up with unconditional taxpayer subsidies under the EU’s appalling Common Agriculture Policy, known as the CAP. Under the CAP, huge amounts of taxpayer money has been dished out each year to farmers according simply to how much land they farm. In the past, these subsidies drove most farmers to grub out ancient hedgerows, remove trees, ponds and wetlands, rough margins and any other “ineligible” features in order to maximise space for harvesting subsidies.
Now, however, outside of the EU, England has grabbed the opportunity to end the madness, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are likely to follow suit. The Agriculture Act 2020, first conceived by Michael Gove, replaces the CAP with a new Environment Land Management Scheme, known as ELM; a world first, built on the premise of public money for public good.
Farmers who, as well as fulfilling their vital role as food producers, take seriously their responsibility as stewards of the natural environment will be rewarded by taxpayers for doing so.
Today it is in our remoter landscapes that farmers are best placed to deliver the kinds of public goods that the new English farm support scheme envisages. ELM must therefore be especially generous with farmers in these landscapes who are understandably feeling vulnerable at this time of great change. We need to support farmers in a fair and just transition back to a more traditional, extensive way of farming with native cattle, whose wild ancestors grazed and browsed here in vibrant wood pastures through the aeons. In low numbers, cattle are less forensic and less voracious in their grazing than sheep, allowing vegetation to establish in mosaic semi-open woodlands that are rich in wildlife of all kinds. By their dung, a single cow generates a quarter of its own body weight in insect life in a single year, food for amphibians, birds and wildlife of many kinds.
Native cattle, such as Longhorns, are the key now to breathing life back into both the ecology and economy of our remoter landscapes.
A while ago, I visited Geltsdale in the Pennines, where the tenant farmer Tom Wilson decided a decade ago to swap his intensive sheep enterprise for a herd of native cattle. Managing several thousand sheep had been hard work and, as the end of his Countryside Stewardship scheme approached in 2010, a local Natural England representative suggested switching from sheep to cattle and a much wilder way of farming. A deal was struck on a pioneering new stewardship scheme. The transition wasn’t easy; initially, the family missed their sheep, but they soon fell in love with their beautiful, shaggy Longhorns and, today, the awakening landscape is a sea of wildflowers dotted with emergent scrub and young trees of all kinds. Amid the melancholic cry of curlews wheeling overhead and birdsong the likes of which I’ve never heard anywhere, Geltsdale is mesmerising.
Some consider a reversion to older ways of farming with native cattle instead of sheep a threat to traditional farming communities. “Straight out of the Mad Hatter’s tea party” was how one commentator described plans for a wilder approach in our national parks during my time at DEFRA. Nothing could be further from the truth. Families who have worked the same land for generations are best placed to breathe life back into our landscapes.
Farmers should not be told what to do with their land. If they want to have sheep, that’s their right. But they should not be receiving lavish subsidies for doing so. Whereas the raising of native cattle in the traditional way amid scrub and trees, known as silvo-pasture in farming circles, really is the best way to secure the future of farming while reviving nature in our wildest landscapes.
Wilder farming really is a silver bullet if ever there was one.
Ben Goldsmith is chair of the Conservative Environment Network and was a non-executive director of DEFRA from 2018 until 2022
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