Image: our volunteers hedge planting at Dinas Mawddwy
A time to be bold on farming, nature and landscapes
We urge Senedd Members to make the proposed amendments to the Bill.
We believe it is particularly important to ensure that landscape is written on the face of the bill. Welsh Government’s recommendations from the recent Biodiversity Deep Dive include a commitment to ‘unlock the potential of designated landscapes (National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) to deliver more for nature’. Specifically identifying landscape conservation as part of the Objectives of the Agriculture Bill is a key step to unlocking that potential. The Sustainable Farming Scheme that comes from the Bill could be the biggest tool for nature recovery ever seen in Wales, if it is properly focused and formulated.
Landscape Amendment
We are supportive of objective 4 of the Bill. However, in omitting reference to landscapes alongside cultural resources, we believe that an important opportunity has been missed. We recommend extending Sustainable Land Management Objective four as follows (amendment in bold):
‘The fourth objective is to conserve and enhance the countryside, its landscapes and cultural resources and promote public access to and engagement with them, and to sustain the Welsh language and promote and facilitate its use.’
Rationale
The purpose of including landscapes on the face of the Bill is to recognise the relationships between people and place. Landscapes are the “product of the interaction of the natural and cultural components of our environment, and how they are understood and experienced by people.” Landscapes encompass not just the aesthetic and perceptual aspects of our environment, but also natural and cultural aspects; effectively embracing geology, wildlife, land use and historic elements and features. Landscapes provide a holistic way of looking at the outputs and outcomes of the Sustainable Farming Scheme in a way that is meaningful to a wide range of people including farming communities and Welsh speakers.
Pride in farming is expressed in the history written in the land, of the efforts of individuals, often across generations, and their collective impact in shaping and using resources at a landscape scale. Lineages of livestock with local names, adapted to the conditions of a particular landscape and its character. Local styles and fashions in field boundaries, reflecting how the local stone comes out of the ground and responds to the hammer. Hillsides cleared of stones by hand over centuries, walled, ditched, hedged, fenced, or ‘clawdded’ to form fields to be cropped, grazed, abandoned, restored. A jigsaw puzzle without a plan, but with a pattern, conforming to the physics of the land and the grain of the materials to hand.
Individual actions in individual parcels of land need a coherent framework of understanding. Our ambitions for nature require us to think bigger than the individual holding. That leads us in the direction of assessing the Sustainable Farming Scheme, not just at a landscape scale, but from a landscape perspective. The agri-environment schemes of the last four decades have shown that we need to connect actions across a substantial area to ensure the investment delivers real net benefits. Part-farm schemes often shift adverse impacts from one field to another, or one holding to another (halo effects). Widely scattered individual holdings in a scheme are ineffective, their benefits swallowed up in the matrix. Monitoring and evaluating the programme will only give meaningful results at a landscape scale.
Landscape is shaped by the actions of individuals over time, interacting with the environment, in the context of producing what society needs. It is a myth that landscape policy focuses on preventing change. Natural Resources Wales has developed LANDMAP as a tool to establish a landscape baseline. Using spatial datasets to classify landscapes, it describes key characteristics, qualities and components, evaluates the importance of landscapes and recommends management guidelines and the need for landscape change. It is a tool for managing landscape change sensitively.
The Welsh language is a language of landscapes – the places, people, history, land-use and natural features are what gives it detail, substance, meaning, and context. Without a coherent landscape, with some kind of continuity, the language is at grave risk of coming adrift of its moorings – the rocks and slopes, the river bends, the buildings that form its ancient fabric, the elements that are permanent enough to warrant a name.
The spectacular range of natural, historical and cultural elements contribute to the richness and widespread fame of our Welsh landscapes. It is essential that they are conserved and protected for present and future generations from the adverse impacts of the climate and biodiversity crises, as well as inappropriate land use and development.
