Kevin Prince has wide experience of farming and rural business in Hampshire, where he lives near Andover, and across southern England as a director in the Adkin consultancy. His family also run a diversified farm with commercial lets, holiday cottages and 800 arable acres.

 

There are still people who, when they see a solitary magpie, will stand to attention, salute, and say “Good morning (or afternoon) Mr Magpie!”

These black and white (and also beautifully iridescent) birds have long been perceived to have connections with all sorts of evil things. Many who grew watching “Magpie”, the Thames TV riposte to “Blue Peter” and “How!” will recall its theme based on the traditional rhyme.  I bet many still recite it as they count the number of magpies passing through their view. They imagine it stopped at “Seven for a secret never to be told” but in fact the traditional rhyme went on through eight and nine to “Ten is a bird you must not miss”. Older versions link the bird instead to the devil and hell as they end.

I mention this because of two things – a decision by the Welsh government to take the magpie off the general licence list and January being the month of the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch.

From New Year’s Day it was no longer possible just to shoot a magpie in Wales, it needed a specific licence granted to an individual shooter. I bet there are many along the English side of the Welsh border who think magpies clever enough to hop across the border at will, flitting into England to grab another songbird and escaping back to Wales as the shotgun is levelled at them!

READ MORE: Kimbridge Barn hosts first winter warmup party

There is a serious side to this, the decline in our songbird populations that drives the RSPB survey. Many farmers are avid birdwatchers. They know what’s on their patch, how to plant fields to encourage birds that predate on pest insect species, and they join farming’s equivalent of the RSPB domestic effort.

Hampshire Chronicle:

Of course, I can’t claim that that there has never been a farmer who put crop production ahead of wildlife but the vast majority of farmers are countrymen who realise that a healthy farm has to have a balance of species populations. Preventing the control of a predator simply leads to the decline of its prey.

Farmers are almost as unpopular as magpies among conservationists, some of whom I suspect would save the magpie and shoot the tractor driver! But with modern farming methods there are fewer tractors in the fields as landowners concentrate on minimum tillage in an effort to improve soil structure.

You may have noticed how at this time of year fields are greener than they used to be. That’s because crops are sown to cover the soil and catch excess fertilisers that would otherwise leach into watercourses, where the pollution encourages the growth of poisonous algal blooms.

But when it comes to sowing the new crop, that greenery needs to be killed off. It can’t be ploughed in because that would destroy soil structure so the dreaded glyphosate is brought into play. Its makers say it’s not a persistent chemical so it breaks down having done its job killing the cover crop.

As the crops rots, it provides both nutrients that help the new crop to grow and organic matter that improves soil structure. It’s a win-win, although not everyone sees it that way. A reader had written to ask about this topic, having heard a radio broadcast from an award winning farmer, so I hope that explains why it’s possible to be both “green” and have chemicals in your farm store.