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In a major blow to biodiversity, the president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said that farmers are tearing up gardens because they cannot afford to keep them.
Rising labor costs and spiraling energy costs mean fruit growers are removing trees from their land, Minet Betters said.
“There was a huge contraction this year for people not wanting to plant gardens and tearing up old gardens because we lost £60m of profit in the first half of this year last year,” she said at a food security event this week. ” .
“So we’re going to have to do a big reset if we’re going to continue to grow this incredibly important sector and not have food shortages behind it.”
Gardens are now a rare habitat in Britain, having been replaced by farms and urban development. England and Wales have lost 56% of their gardens since 1900. Traditional gardens have been particularly hard hit with a decline of 81%, roughly equivalent to an area the size of the West Midlands.
As habitats they provide huge benefits for carbon sequestration and wildlife, especially pollinators and birds.
Batters said the loss of fruit trees is devastating to biodiversity. “We want to see more orchards, but if you’re out there with an orchard that you haven’t been able to harvest apples from, what are you supposed to do?
“We should really really encourage buying British apples and pears and grow more of them here. Why not us?”
Some farmers keep fruit trees on their land, even if there is no immediate profit, because they improve biodiversity, carbon sequestration and soil health on their farms.
Martin Lines, chairman of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, said old trees should not be felled if farmers can avoid it.
“It’s important for biodiversity, but apples and pears are also something we can use in the future,” he said. “The seed bank is really important, to have older cultivars that may eventually become more resilient as we face climate change, and we risk losing those if we tear down the older orchards.”
Experts say the government should compensate farmers for keeping their old orchards. Andrew Allen, policy lead for land use at the Woodland Trust, said: “We need to better manage land for nature, combining it with productive agriculture. Traditional gardens are a particularly important example of this, offering a mosaic of trees, grasses, shrubs and wildflowers that make them ideal for wildlife.
“The government’s new policy is to arrest the long-term decline in the number of traditional gardens [environmental land management] ELM scheme. It should not only discourage farmers from growing traditional orchards but actively reward good management that benefits nature.”
Lines added: “Farmers need to see the economic benefit of having those trees. If they are facing increasing labor costs, energy costs, it is very difficult to keep them. The government needs to encourage farmers to keep their gardens in these difficult times or they will be lost.
“Farmers are currently choosing a business. Due to uncertainty in the market and supply chain, they are intensifying their farming systems to get more commodities out of production. And I think that will lead to a continued decline in biodiversity.”
Mark Tufnell, president of the Country Land and Business Association, said: “Gardens must continue to be supported. While greater certainty would help a lot, the trouble with this whole transition is that it’s taking too long to do. If anyone has the opportunity to receive any government support to help biodiversity in their traditional garden, they should find out about it as soon as possible.
Jack Fiennes, who runs nature-friendly farming at Holkham Nature Reserve in Norfolk, argues that farmers who are unable to pick apples from their orchards should be paid to grow them wild rather than planting them.
He said: “One bird species that has seen significant declines is the lesser spotted woodpecker. It has seen a catastrophic decline in the last few decades. It is our smallest woodpecker, and requires low-intervention woodland. We are seeing an increase in the number of lesser spotted woodpeckers in abandoned gardens because there is no intervention, they have made a home there.
“Gardens, because they are full of flowers, they bloom, there is an array of biodiversity under them. When they are abandoned they become full of species. We need to figure out how land managers get value for those abandoned orchards.”
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