IN THE COUNTRY by Laurence Main Many "animal-loving" town-dwellers have a naive sentimentality about cows adorning meadows and chickens scratching in farmyards. The dairy and poultry industries exploit these images when advertising their products. Some people see the vegan diet as a direct threat to this illusion. In fact the traditional English countryside is already being destroyed by an agricultural equivalent of the industrial revolution that is well under way in chillingly Orwellian proportions. This was stimulated by the second world war, which emphasised the need for Britain to become more self-sufficient in food. Since then quick profits have become the prime motive, factory methods have been applied to farming and our landscape and its wildlife has suffered disastrously. HEDGEROW DESTRUCTION The most apparent change has been the ripping out of hedgerows and the felling of trees to create large fields without any obstructions for modern agricultural machines. These are often twenty or thirty feet wide and require considerable room to manoeuvre. With a quarter of our hedgerows (approximately 120,000 miles) removed between 1946 and 1974, our countryside is in danger of becoming a dull uniform prairie devoid of wildlife. One Huntingdon sample, quoted'in Marion Shoard's "The Theft of the Countryside", showed 80% of the hedgerow trees had been cleared between 1947 and 1972. TREES The original land-cover for most of Britain was deciduous trees. The destruction of our great forests is a major historical tragedy. The mass felling of our oaks for shipbuilding in the Napoleonic wars totally exterminated a variety of oak with a tannin-free acorn that could well have formed a staple fare of Ancient British people and was almost certainly specially selected, nurtured and propagated by them. Nowadays to reintroduce it in Britain we would probably have to import acorns from tannin-free American oaks. Our modern farmers are speedily cutting down the surviving tree population. As the trees go, so does the wildlife. There is afforestation, but factory-style greed has replaced the longerterm deciduous trees with dull blocks of conifer monoculture. These "factory-trees" are often imported species, liable to disease (and, therefore, pesticides) and fail to attract wildlife. In Dorset, for example, conifers were a tiny minority of the trees when Thomas Hardy was writing "The Woodlanders", but conifers now outnumber deciduous trees there by more than three to one. TRADITIONAL GRASSLANDS The most insidious assault on our countryside has been the ryegrass revolution. Chemical ryegrass monoculture is designed to produce milk more quickly. To the casual observer, one grass may look just like any other, but this modern aid to the dairy industry has put our riverside meadows and our chalk downland, so rich in wildlife and such a joy to walk on, at a premium. The Italian ryegrass suffers from that vulnerability to disease so prevalent in exotic monoculture species and needs careful handling, so walking is discouraged and pesticides are employed.
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