Solving the land-use jigsaw in Scotland: poetry, music, farmers and science
by Dr. Alison Smith, Senior Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
Art, science, farming and nature came together in a tent in a field in Scotland this summer, in a unique event organised by SEDA Land.
SEDA’s session on ‘solving the land-use jigsaw’ took place at the second Groundswell Outreach sustainable farming festival on the Falkland Estate in Scotland (GO Falkland). This is a spin-off from the hugely successful Groundswell festival in England that attracts thousands of farmers, researchers and policymakers every year.
With farmland covering 70% of the UK, nature-based farming methods have a huge role to play in a sustainable future. Yet this is a sensitive and hotly debated topic, as land-use decisions involve complex tensions between competing goals such as nature recovery, food and timber production, recreation, water, soil, climate, local economies and cultures.
To address these issues, Gail Halvorsen at SEDA brought together an expert panel from science and practice for a thought-provoking debate. Like all SEDA’s events, the talks were interspersed with poetry, music and art - commissioned from local artists - that allowed space for reflection and inspiration. The aim was to work towards a social-ecological approach to landscape planning that could inform the delivery plan for Scotland’s third land-use strategy.
The session was preceded by half an hour of stunning photographs from Ted Leeming, an artist who is travelling around Scotland to capture our rapidly changing landscapes. Ted’s photos explore the cultural narratives around extraction and regeneration of resources, aiming to highlight how new thinking can deliver positive change.
SEDA’s session opened with an extraordinary poem from Chris Powici, who had the audience veering from laughter to tears as the mundane tale of a land-use forum manager evolved into a mythological encounter with a water-nymph. One line was particularly striking to those steeped in the endless balancing of land-use tensions:
‘And what about all the useless things? What about the noonday light through a mayfly’s wing? …. Who’ll speak up for them?’
Following this powerful opener, Alison Smith from the Nature-based Solutions Initiative at the University of Oxford gave an overview of the challenges around multifunctional land use. Although much of the debate presents a dichotomy between ‘land-sparing’ and ‘land-sharing’ approaches, Alison drew on recent work for the Scottish Government to show that these are not mutually exclusive. Combining sustainable productivity improvements with agro-ecological methods can increase benefits and reduce trade-offs between food or timber production and environmental goals. She showed how nature-based solution opportunity maps such as those developed by the Agile Initiative at the Oxford Martin School can be used to spark conversations and help stakeholders explore the pros and cons of alternative land-use options.
To show how this community-led land-use planning can work in practice, Graham Begg, head of the Agroecology Group at the James Hutton Institute drew on his experience with supporting local farmers to transition to agroecological methods such as planting hedgerows, restoring grasslands and woodlands. He described the challenge of solving the land-use jigsaw as a ‘wicked problem’, as it involves complex social and ecological systems and may have multiple answers. People need to ‘think holistically and behave inclusively’, working together to solve problems collaboratively, such as through the farmer cluster model emerging in England.
Another enthralling poem, Hillside and Hedge from Sophie Cooke, wove art, science and policy into a vision of nature-rich farming that covered everything from the ‘mycorrhizal cobweb’ of fungi that sustains healthy soils, to the need to pay farmers for carbon storage, and the plea to ‘let the wild places and the half wild places be joined’.
This led to a lively panel debate featuring Marian Bruce from Bioregioning Tayside, Grant Moir, CEO of the Cairngorms National Park, Denise Walton, chair of the Nature Friendly Farming Network and Andrew Heald, a forestry consultant, ably chaired by Lucy Filby from South of Scotland Enterprise.
Lucy challenged the panel by asking ‘Why have we not solved this already’? There was agreement that we need to bring together national policies with the landscape scale and the local scale, building trust amongst local communities. People need to sit down and get to know each other before they can work together to solve land use problems. National decision makers need to understand the importance of the local context – the arable east of Scotland is very different to the wild west coast, for example.
We also need to break down silos – for example, Andrew recalled how there was no mixing between farming and forestry students at college, and this is a real barrier for integrated landscape management. We need to move away from thinking about farming, forestry and nature as competing land uses, fenced off into separate blocks, and look for ways to do things differently. This will require more integrated support and subsidy systems, abandoning unhelpful restrictions such as minimum tree-planting densities, to allow more flexible options such as wood pasture.
As Denise said, the ‘Bank of Nature’ is foreclosing, so we need to work with the bank by supporting soil health, and restoring carbon, nutrient and water cycles. But the wider food system is a real constraint. Farmers have the ability and capacity to produce food more sustainably, but many are squeezed financially by the policies of the big supermarkets, and are struggling with debt. Supermarkets need to be brought into these conversations, and financial institutions need to support more sustainable systems, but they seriously underestimate climate risk.
Land-use decisions can produce both winners and losers, and political leadership is needed to ensure a just transition to low carbon bioeconomy. Difficult issues were raised, such as the large areas of arable land devoted to producing beer and whisky rather than food – important for trade and the economy, but is this the best use of land in the long term?
Before opening up to questions from the audience, we were treated to music inspired by the idea of birdsong as an indicator of ecosystem and community health, as a string trio led by Jessica Kerr played in harmony with recordings of birds singing in the local woods. It was a fitting end to an unforgettable event, in which the mix of art, science and practice encouraged a balanced and rational debate around an emotive topic, opening a path to further long-term engagement and interactions.