Sir, – The cost of maintaining rural hedgerows to a suburban garden standard is an unnecessary annual expense for farmers. The rate of approximately €50 to €70 per hour for contractors must place a large additional burden on tight farming budgets.
This was a practice unseen in rural Ireland 40 years ago.
Apart from the loss of valuable habitat and carbon storage capacity, the next generation of hedgerow trees will never emerge from an annually cropped hedge. We are in the process of losing most of our ash trees to ash dieback. The vast majority of our larger hedgerow trees are ash trees and their loss will become very apparent over the next few years if efforts are not made to replace them with other species such as oak, lime, beech, chestnut, maple, etc.
An annual payment should be introduced to encourage farmers to maintain their hedges in a nature-friendly manner and the yearly cropping of hedgerows should be discouraged. There seems to be a reluctance to do this possibly because contractors who have invested in hedge cutting machinery form an influential lobby in rural Ireland. – Yours, etc,
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TOM GELLETLIE,
Rathnew,
Co Wicklow.
