Nature and food–how to have it all
Feb 09, 2022
4 minutes
WHEN the tide is in, I try to spend a few minutes each day birdwatching. In winter, most times, I am rewarded with sightings of a dozen curlews, plus oystercatchers, ringed plover, snipe and, if I am lucky, a flock of 48 lapwings. It gives me great satisfaction because it confirms we are farming in an environmentally sensitive way—the soil would not be healthy enough to support the invertebrates on which the waders are feeding if we weren’t. However, before the Springwatch team descends on us, lamenting the state of modern agriculture, I should make it clear that we have not ‘rewilded’; in fact, as far as the apparatchiks in the Scottish Government are concerned, we have ‘de-wilded’.
‘The biggest obstacle to biodiversity
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