The author of a new book on rewilding has called for a radical shake-up of the farm payments system, giving farmers the voluntary option of ‘producing’ natural habitat and biodiversity instead of food.
Sculptor conservator, farmer and rewilder, Eoghan Daltun, author of An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding, rewilded a 73ac farm he bought on the Beara peninsula in west Cork in 2009.
He contended that the raft of benefits delivered by wild natural ecosystems such as native woodland are now – or should be – recognised as no less essential to society than food, and that fact must be reflected in how farmers are rewarded for what they do.
“We need to start giving them [farmers] another option – that of continuing to receive farm subsidies for not farming their land, but for letting wild nature come back instead, if that is what they choose,” he said in An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding.
The book won the Bookstation Book of the Year gong at the recent An Post Irish Book Awards 2022.
“It’s vital to stress that none of this should be mandatory in any way,” he added.
“It should be entirely up to each individual farmer to decide what he or she wants to do – either carrying on producing food, allow their land to revert to natural habitat and be custodians of that process, or a combination of the two,” Eoghan said.
He lives on the Beara farm with his two sons, Liam and Seanie, their collie dog, Charlie, and five Dexter cows.
“But for those looking for alternative possibilities, ‘growing’ wildlife habitat should be made just as viable an option in terms of state support as growing food,” he said in the book.
However, there would clearly have to be important stipulations in all this, he admitted.
“Payment levels for farming and non-farming land would have to be completely equal, and a watertight guarantee given that they would remain so,” Eoghan contended.
“Similarly, farmers would need just as strong a guarantee that such an initiative wouldn’t be yet another transient scheme that would be abandoned after five, 10 or 20 years as they have seen happen with so many others.
“But neither should farmers be able to just walk away from land and forget about it. For example, monitoring for – and eradication of – invasive non-native species, such as rhododendron, would be essential, and over-browsing by herbivores like deer prevented if necessary,” Eoghan added.
Eoghan stated that those farmers who prefer to carry on with sheep, or any other type of farming, must be absolutely free to do so, and with all the current financial supports.
“The latter should be greatly increased in agriculturally marginal disadvantaged areas like Beara,” he contended.
CAP and farm payments
Eoghan believes that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is failing to deliver for either nature or people, including farmers.
He said it is “getting the balance very wrong on many levels”.
“Presently 33% of subsidies go to only 1% of farms. Widening that out, 80% of the money goes to 20% of farms,” he said.
“The result is the continuing death of both nature and small family farms. More and more farmers are getting out – 4.2 million across Europe in recent years, an immense social and economic tragedy for rural areas.
“Periodically, attempts at meaningful reform are made, most recently in 2020, but are always blocked.
“Every time, a legion of extremely well-resourced lobbyists for the most industrial sides of farming, and all the vested interests behind them, kick into action. They have privileged access to the politicians deciding how the hundreds of billions of euro in farm subsidies are spent, and ensure that little or nothing changes regarding where the money goes,” the author alleged.
Eoghan argued that the CAP in its present form is a “gigantic taxpayer-funded nature-killing machine” which does little to help smaller farmers.
“If it cannot be reformed, then popular demands for it to scrapped will inevitably grow and become unstoppable as ever more people become aware of its destructive effects, and object to funding that through their hard earned tax payments,” he claimed.
“As a very minimum, the cake must be equally shared with smaller farmers, and the Good Agricultural and Environment Condition (GAEC) requirement completely moved without delay.
“Biophilia – affinity with nature – in farmers, is currently crushed by a system that does nothing to encourage it, but instead pushes an agenda in which production must always be the main, if not sole, consideration.”
Nature, he said, has a big role to play in revitalising local communities in many rural areas.
“Allowing wild nature to come back in a big way is a powerful antidote to rural decline,” he said.
“Getting farmers onside is vital, and the best means of achieving this is by dramatically changing the farm payments system.”
However, the author said he also believed that the main reasons for allowing nature to come back should not be economic.
Rewilding
“We need wild healthy ecosystems because they are crucial not only to the proper functioning of the biosphere we all depend on, but to our own emotional and psychological wellbeing, whether we realise it or not,” Eoghan continued
Beyond what they do for us, wild species and ecosystems have a right to exist for their own sake, according to the author who moved from Dublin to Beara with his family in 2009.
Part memoir, part environmental treatise, his book discusses some of the burning issues of our time: Climate breakdown; ecological collapse; and why our very survival as a species requires that we urgently and radically transform our relationship with nature.
The tale of how the author who was reared in Dublin and travelled extensively, sold the cottage in Kilmainham, Dublin which he had rebuilt from a ruin, and bought an abandoned farm overlooking the Atlantic, is fascinating.
Much of the land was covered in wild native forest which, although beautiful, was ecologically wrecked by severe overgrazing and invasion by a host of alien plant species.
Over the years since, the author brought life back to the land, with new temperate rainforest spontaneously forming where previously there was only barren grass.
Rewilding most of the land, and high nature-value farming the rest, there has been plenty of time to reflect on the ecological crisis unfolding around us, and its solutions, he said.