THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE, 2010

This article first appeared in Country Life in an edited form in 2010

The cutting by flail of farm hedges is only a small thing if you compare it with the slaughter of whales for 'scientific' or any other purposes. It's only a small thing if you compare it with the multi-nationals who (allegedly) are fishing blue-fin tuna to extinction and stock-piling their catches in vast cold storage warehouses to sell at truffle-high prices when the blue-fin eventually does become extinct.
    These are big issues involving complex strategies and international law and protocol. Shouting in the street and adding your name to a web petition can be no more than token gestures. The case against hedge flailing is at least a manageable one if for no other reason that it is, admittedly, of rather less import than those oceanic questions.
    But the fact that hedge flailing is of little comparative importance does not make it something to be ignored. Indeed it is often impossible to ignore it - roadside hedges near where I live have been brutalised in the middle of February this year - a time when many songbirds were making claims to their territories. Territories that in a few crashing minutes would become worthless to them.
    So what's to be done? Do we have to learn from our heroes at Greenpeace who drive their inflatables between harpoon and whale in the Southern Ocean? Should we ask those people, whom I neither applaud nor condemn and who stand between the hounds and the fox, to do something here? Just a thought.
    Being something to do with farming you can be sure that the flailing of hedges is also something to do with economics. But I am not convinced that the economic arguments for this form of hedge (mis)management are convincing. Money talks, we know this, but I am inclined to think that agriculturally, it is often the case that money swears. I have, I admit, done no research into this but I find it hard to believe that the figures make sense. What is the cost of a tractor and flail, the operator's wages, insurance, diesel, maintenance and more when set against the cost of traditional hedge-laying once every seven or so years?
    Apart from the visual and actual brutalism (which any re-incarnated official war artist who was at the Battle of the Somme would feel he'd seen before), hedge flailing is noisy, violent and is yet another example of the way some farmers now regard the land and landscape. It is a regard founded on the premise that agriculture now works against, rather than with nature and that nature has become the enemy of the farmer where once she, as 'mother nature', was an ally. She may have been a fickle, temperamental, truculent and unpredictable ally, but she was an ally nonetheless.
    As Kenneth Allsop famously wrote in an article on the threats to the environment in The Sunday Times in the early 1970s 'Money talks - beauty is voiceless.' How I wish he were wrong but I fear that, as so often, Mr Allsop was painfully prescient.