‘There are two main reasons for burning land. Both involve cold hard cash’

To a non-farmer it’s hard to see the sense in setting fire to land. Put aside the loss of wildlife, danger of burning down human homes, the pollution and disastrous carbon emissions from burning peatland, why would you set fire to your asset? The Irish Wildlife Trust did a deep dive into land burning and found lots of rules but very little implementation. This year hillsides in west Cork and Kerry blazed again, to the exhaustion of fire fighters and the despair of wildlife and nature lovers.

There are two main reasons for burning, and both involve cold hard cash. Torching a gorse-laden hill is cheap (until it’s not, when you factor in loss of livestock, property or people hours spent fighting fires). And here’s the head melt: the taxpayer funded farm payments system incentivised it. But now that game has changed. And everyone can benefit.

I learned more about this thanks to Maureen Kilgore. She’s a sheep farmer and co-ordinator of the Irish Agroforestry Forum (IAF). We worked together on a series of podcasts called Conversation Beneath the Trees and she is a huge source of knowledge on nature-friendly farming and farmers.

Next month Kilgore will be lambing. “We lamb outdoors, the sheep usually [lamb] next to a hedgerow, the fallen leaves from the autumn providing a bed and the birds in the trees overhead serenading each lamb,” she wrote in an IAF newsletter. “The hedgerows are now chattering away all day, full of nesting birds.”

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That evocative description of hedgerows “chattering away” contrasts so strongly to the pictures of silent scorched earth or the box cut hedgerows where knee-high bare sticks remain of what was once a happy wildlife habitat.

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The good news is that the basic farm payment rules have changed, Kilgore explains. Last year “in order to be eligible for basic payment, a land parcel could not have more than 10 per cent of what were classified as ineligible features such as scrub, trees, copses, woodland habitat and rock,” she says. That has now been increased up to 50 per cent.

“This change will also discourage farmers from removing woodland scrub and gorse from farmland, both of which are valuable for wildlife as well as shelter and fodder for livestock,” Kilgore says.

“Woodland scrub also contributes significantly to carbon capture, therefore it is important to retain it and allow food production to continue on the land.”

The system change has the potential to put a rewilding or nature-friendly payment into the pockets of farmers.

From March 1st it became illegal to burn or cut hedgerows and scrub as the annual moratorium to protect nesting birds began. Maybe as November rolls around, and it becomes legal again, it will no longer be logical to slash and burn nature-rich habitats off the map from both an economic and an environmental point of view.