LINKING LANDSCAPES – THE FARMER’S ROLE

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JOHN COUSINS LINKING LANDSCAPES – THE FARMER’S ROLE

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LINKING LANDSCAPES – THE FARMER’S ROLE JOHN COUSINS It is amazing how farming has changed just during my own lifetime, in the last 50 years. If we go back far enough, we had a farming management system that was actually perfect for nature. 18th century paintings show a landscape that was totally geared towards farming which also produced perfect conditions for wildlife to flourish – a totally natural environment. Now we have livestock on farms and the land is managed intensively with monocultures of grass to produce food for that livestock. Going back far enough, we had a system where the livestock actually complemented the management just as we introduce grazing on our wildlife reserves across the country. Grazing was actually sympathetic to management and helped create the conditions that allowed wildlife to flourish. I can remember horses on the farm. We had horses until 1965, so we are only talking about 46 years ago. Fast forward to the present and we have a system inside a tractor that uses GPS which links to the steering column that steers the tractor in a straight line. The operator can just sit and watch television or look through his binoculars. It is a stunning transformation, and now when you look at fields it is not that the people who drill our fields are brilliant at keeping a straight line, which was always the challenge with the horse which always had his own ideas, it is because of the GPS. Then with the computer linked in showing the yield map it can be linked with the sprayer, so that when you’re spraying the field appropriate levels of fertiliser are sprayed in proportion to expected yield. Even harvesting with a combine is in absolutely perfect strips. Altogether, a stunning change. So where does it go from here? I just don’t know. I think we will see tractors that are operating without a person. The only reason why that can’t be done now is because of pylons in fields and other obstacles. We are going to see mammoth changes. Are they going to be good for wildlife? What do we really want farmers to do in the landscape? What can they do and what changes can they make? Well, top of the list would be to improve conditions for wildlife. It is an important role for farmers yet so often we forget this role; the important tasks that farmers have got to do in the countryside.

Figure 1. Use of GPS for automated tractor steering and crop yield maps linked to fertiliser sprayers have transformed modern farming.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)


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