{"id":370991,"date":"2025-08-25T00:14:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T00:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/370991\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T00:14:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T00:14:13","slug":"alasdair-boden-flying-shows-patchwork-of-uk-farming-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/370991\/","title":{"rendered":"Alasdair Boden: Flying shows patchwork of UK farming success"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For those people who want to rid the land of livestock, I\u00a0would recommend getting on a plane.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year, I lucked out with a window seat on a flight to Turkey.<\/p>\n<p>As we flew out of Manchester, I marvelled at the wiggling patchwork of hedges and ponds, and of the diversity of landscape diversity below me.<\/p>\n<p>See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fwi.co.uk\/farm-life\/young-farmers\/alasdair-boden-accidental-farmers-bring-fresh-ideas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alasdair Boden \u2013 \u2018accidental\u2019 farmers bring fresh ideas<\/a><\/p>\n<p>About the author<\/p>\n<p><b>Alasdair Boden<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Having been brought up in Kendal, Alasdair Boden returned to the Lake District in 2019 when he and his wife, Heather, bought a holiday cottage business. The 37-year-old describes himself as an \u201caccidental farmer\u2019 having later acquired the 40ha historically connected to the enterprise.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-radius:100%\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Alasdair-Boden-c-Alasdair-Boden-150x150.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p>An hour later, the plane was over Holland, where the land was a vast wasteland of right-angled fields with differing shades of well-worn browns.<\/p>\n<p>Is this what those same people want?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So, I just wanted to say well done. Forget the loud social media, forget the government and forget The Guardian.<\/p>\n<p>Compared to so many countries around the world, we are doing an incredible job to preserve, repair and build on the environmental work done so far.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>My concern, though, is the balancing act. The mountains of the Lake District have been stripped of sheep to encourage more flora.<\/p>\n<p>To break even, farmers are instead grazing the lower valley fields and the ones on the edge of the Lake District with a greater intensity.<\/p>\n<p>The very tops of the mountains might one day be a floral meadow \u2013 however, the fields below will be biologically dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But this brings me back to the likes of Holland and my flight.<\/p>\n<p>What the government is doing in the UK is disincentivising food production and, instead, importing food from faraway countries \u2013 with some having questionable environmental, let alone animal welfare, policies.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0answer? Go back to the balance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We can\u2019t turn the entire country into a Knepp Estate. But we can do more with hedges and edges.<\/p>\n<p>In general, we\u2019re not doing a bad job. The view from my flight was encouraging.<\/p>\n<p>Every so often we hear of entire estates being planted with non-native trees, over historic wildflower meadows \u2013 and, conversely, of those that follow the yield and go full tilt posing a danger to the biology of the land.<\/p>\n<p>But Britain is a bastion of farming. We should, at the very least, be proud of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For those people who want to rid the land of livestock, I\u00a0would recommend getting on a plane.\u00a0 Earlier&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-370991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115086522103537707","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}