83: Mr. Negus Comes To Wales

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.

Richard Negus: Keep on running. White with one. Thank you. I made full use of my Wetherspoons. Sorry, you can keep talking. That's OK. I made very good use of my Wetherspoons. Thing today, and I had three cups of coffee, not because I wanted three cups of coffee, but because it's included in my room price. So therefore, I had three cups of coffee. I had to force the last one down, actually.

Richard Prideaux: There's no way you're going to let the \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* get away with not giving you as much coffee as you could physically take in.

Richard Negus: Yes, exactly. It's a very British thing, is that if it's there, I'll have it.

Richard Prideaux: This is why buffets never really took off in commercial settings in the UK, isn't it? Because we'd abuse it.

Richard Negus: Yeah, absolutely. Oh man, you go on holiday to like places like, you know, where they have these all-in-one things and we're terrible at it because we still have our British queuing idea. So we don't like it because Germans barge in front of you. But then you're going back and it's the only time you will see British people. Actually, what you're having for breakfast I'm having some of this weird-looking ham that's got, I think it's got nuts in. Three hard-boiled eggs. What's that? I think it's a waffle. What's this? A croissant. There you go. And then some fried eggs, some hot dog sausages, and yeah, people coming back with this sort of, literally the whole of Europe on a plate, and then they go back again and then say, oh, I better have some music, otherwise I'll get...

Richard Prideaux: A lot of like carveries, isn't it? They've taken off. Because that's why, because you're limited on your meat selection, but they let you fill up on the veg. You can have as many potatoes as you want because it's a penny per plate to them. So the carvery is the only buffet that works in the UK for our mindset.

Richard Negus: It's weird. I have to say I'm not a great fan of carvery. I do not like the principle of queuing up for food. I just feel that.

Richard Prideaux: Something of the bread line about it.

Richard Negus: Yeah, there is. There's something of school, the bread line. And also, I don't want to walk back through a load of voyeurs at other tables saying, fat \*\*\*\*\*\*.

Richard Prideaux: Look at him.

Richard Negus: What has he got? All right.

Richard Prideaux: He's feeling judged. Yeah. But you don't get that when you're walking back with a tray full of drinks, do you?

Richard Negus: No, In actual fact, there's a slight sort of mutual, all right, because you've got, you know, You've only got beer.

Richard Prideaux: It's like it's that. If you get the triangle of pints, you can do that. Yeah.

Richard Negus: Oh, yeah. Unfortunately now, though, of course, with the wonky fingers, I'm not only is my fielding not as good as it used to be, but I can carry fewer pints because of this. You know, the issues are real. I know I'm speaking to someone with like metal legs now, but I mean, you're not really going, yeah, what leg, singular, but you know, it is something that I do feel the pressure is on me now when I'm carrying pints because of my wonky fingers.

Richard Prideaux: You didn't make me go and get the round last night, though.

Richard Negus: Well, you know, I think it's the most important thing that when you get injuries like this, you've got to work it. Oh, look, La Coffee Santarivo.

Richard Prideaux: Oh, just out of shot, there's coffee being made by our lovely assistant.

Richard Negus: Yes.

Richard Prideaux: She's also the producer of the show.

Richard Negus: I do like that she's dressed in traditional sort of wood nymph. Outfit, which is excellent. No wonder you're always hanging around coppicing. I like the funny ears as well. Oh, the funny ears. She is really a nymph. She really is an elf. I knew it.

Richard Prideaux: She's genetically from Lincolnshire, so I think that's how they look like down there.

Richard Negus: It's actually a gill extension. Yeah, it's funny.

Richard Prideaux: So anyway, you may have noticed that this is a video podcast, and if you haven't, Are you listening to it on the audio one? Or go to the links, there's a video version that you can watch. Because we have in person Richard Negus.

Richard Negus: Hooray! We actually do occasionally get together, don't we, and sort of hold hands and skip about. Not usually in a woodland setting though, it must be said.

Richard Prideaux: We haven't got any in Suffolk.

Richard Negus: We've got loads of woods in Suffolk. We are not as heavily wooded. As here. But do you know, actually the least wooded county, of course, is Lincolnshire. It's 3% apparently, which, funnily enough, is what, was it 3, 2% woodland cover at the end of the First World War across the country.

Richard Prideaux: Yes, it's. And we are much, much higher now. I mean, if I was a better presenter, I would have got the figures ready, but it'll be whatever's on the screen now. But You're here because this is, well, we can once again say you have a book coming out.

Richard Negus: I've got a book coming out. You know, I mean, you think this podcast has been going so long now. We bored people when we first started because, you know, my first book's coming out and now the next book's coming out. So, yes, so the next one is not just about hedges, obviously they do feature in it, but I'm going around and meeting loads of fascinating, interesting people who are people who work on the land, but they are people who continue to be those, what's the term, landscape generators. You see, because I just get fed up with all this thing that us humans are robbed at. The system. And the wood we're sat in now, you're doing it, you're working this wood. Generations of people before have worked these woods, just the same as hedge layers planted, laid hedges and dry stone wallers, built walls. And just the same as reed cutters cut reeds and use those. And all our landscape is completely man-made. There isn't a single inch of wild in it. I mean, do you think there's any wild left in...

Richard Prideaux: Well, there are wild places where, and places where if you go and lay down there, you'll die of hypothermia before someone finds you. But every bit of the British Isles has had sort of the touch of man on it.

Richard Negus: Yeah.

Richard Prideaux: For 10,000 years at least. We keep finding, again, we keep finding, we don't, we don't, we don't find anything, but people keep finding these sort of remains of campfire sites and remains of early industry and find out, oh, actually people were felling woodland here 5000 years ago and the evidence of, well, the hills up here, I mean, part of the reason they don't have trees on is because they were felled for the sort of the edges of the hill forts that were put there and there were these Iron Age hill forts. People have been doing stuff in all these landscapes for so, long. We can't remove that story.

Richard Negus: Which is why I get rather fed up with the rewilding narrative is that you turn a clock back and I get even more fed up with like the biodiversity intactness index that's used by Natural England to get this narrative that we're the most nature depleted country in Europe. Because they use a set date of 1700 as the, what do we like compared with 1700. By 1700, we were already an absolute powerhouse of not only land use for agriculture, but land use in mining. I was up the other week in Wensleydale, and I was stood atop a Bronze Age stone wall that had tumbled and an enclosure. And that was taken over. Here you are. Here's A Bronze Age mine. And so they're mining then, you know, if you only got to go to Grimes Graves near in East Anglia, and there they have got Stone Age mining for flints. So we who have been industrial, we have changed the landscape. 1700, it's such a stupid nominal date and there's all these complete buffoons who have bought this idea hook, line and sinker that, you know, and poor old, poor old biodiversity in this country. We have just, we've rubbed man out of it, we've made us the bad guy. This isn't the work of bad guys here, is it?

Richard Prideaux: And this is all, we were just trying to work this out before we recorded, but I've been trying to work this out for two years. Why is this woodland here? Because the big ash tree that was sat underneath, that's quite old. That's over 100 years old, I'd say. But then the older trees around it, they're probably 20th century, they're probably less than 100 years old. That was not, that looks like an ash tree that's grown in a woodland, not something that's grown in the middle of a field because it hasn't got all the marks on the side from where animals have been grazing on it and things. So this was a tree that grew up in a woodland but before this woodland. So there's a reason there's not that woodland that was there before and there's this new woodland. Someone had to make that change and it doesn't just happen by accident. This wasn't The forest fire, this is all, this has been replanted, but by someone who's not here anymore.

Richard Negus: And someone with a purpose, because no one ever used, I mean, when you think about it, we were just over the way there and we're watching them silaging. And fent and class machinery is taking the strain. When this was all done, it was nothing but grunt, human grunt. And so you wouldn't have done this on a whim. You didn't do it because that looks pretty. You did it for a reason. And if this wood was indeed planted then and it's largely older, they wouldn't have thought, well, perhaps when this has matured sufficiently, when I'm going to fell it, they will have invented chainsaws by then. They would have been thinking that it will still be an axe. So therefore, they must have thought, what am I going to use this for then? Was it for charcoal? I mean, So we know that older had a lot of charcoal.

Richard Prideaux: It was charcoal, it was basically, it was a chemical input, it was for gunpowder. It was the carbon, particular carbon percentage in the chemical rating for older charcoal made it better for making gunpowder than hazel charcoal or willow charcoal. So it was an industrial input, it was a chemical.

Richard Negus: And I suppose perhaps, because we know that we've actually got a road in Stowmarket called Gunpowder Way. And that was because that was where the gunpowder factory was. And the reason why there was not a lot of trees around that neck of the woods was because they chopped them all down and they turned them into gunpowder. And then it blew up, which is rather cool. There was a great big explosion and Gunpowder Way is no more. Really? Yeah. And it's, but they had a sort of canal-like system, which they ferried things about. Talking canals. Here's a very funny thing. Someone was telling me the other day, I think it's someone from the CLA, yeah, it was from the CLA in the east, they were telling me that they'd done a talk on improving biodiversity on farms and whatnot. But they weren't just talking to landowners, they were talking like to other rural businesses. And they'd all done all this stuff, say, well, how we can improve hedgerows and how we can do this, how we can do the other. And then this guy who was doing the, is there any questions? He stood up and he said, he goes, I've noticed, he said, that most of the fields around here have got these mini canals. He goes, if we just widen them, right? We wouldn't need to transport stuff by roads anymore. We could just go and put them down the many canals. And I was going, many canals, what are you talking about? And so I went, you talking about ditches? And he went, is that what you call them? And he went, yeah, it's not really going to work. So he thought, he had stood, so he thought, whilst he's listening to this, that it would be a very sensible idea to expand ditches, and he thought he'd invented a new method of transportation of goods. Via these mini canals, which turns out to be ditches.

Richard Prideaux: So he's invented the early industrial revolution again.

Richard Negus: Well done, Telford.

Richard Prideaux: You can get some horses and you can drag them along. Yeah, People could live on them. Get a load of Irish over, they could dig them out.

Richard Negus: Yeah, we could perhaps go and have things like, be lovely, we could perhaps go and paint our kettles just to celebrate them. Yeah. Honestly, it's, you realise just how challenging It is because the whole, the wood nymph has come with some coffee.

Richard Prideaux: The coffee has arrived.

Richard Negus: Thank you.

Richard Prideaux: These are made from titanium, these mugs.

Richard Negus: Are they?

Richard Prideaux: Well, they're not very good titanium, so I think it's made from sort of melted down Chinese MiG fighter or?

Richard Negus: Something like that. Is that also, thank you, Amy. Is that also what your legs are now made of?

Richard Prideaux: No, it's stainless steel.

Richard Negus: Stainless steel.

Richard Prideaux: I'm not worth titanium, apparently. I can't do that, which I can't like straighten it without. Pain. So there's a big plate there and that's all because that bit turned to Weetabix.

Richard Negus: I think you need to have a baggier trouser from here on in. That's you want to have trousers like mine. Bell bottom slacks.

Richard Prideaux: Well, yours have got knee pad things in them as well.

Richard Negus: I'm dead tactical. These are these are Polish combat trousers. Yeah, you know, look what the Poles can do.

Richard Prideaux: My phone is ringing, the one I said I'd definitely turned off, but we'll ignore that.

Richard Negus: Yeah, so the.

Richard Prideaux: The other reason you're here is so that we can introduce you to some farmers.

Richard Negus: Some farmers, yeah.

Richard Prideaux: So you're looking at livestock?

Richard Negus: I am. I'm looking at livestock because I was talking at, so I came over this way. I'm on a complete cook's tour. So I've had two weeks where I'm travelling. I've been down to Surrey and Sussex looking at Coppers' woodland managers down there. Then I went up to Sirencester. And then I went to Malvern, to the Three Counties Show, where I spoke to some livestock farmers there, and Patrick Galbraith and I did a talk for the CLA there. Then I went to the Monty Lit Festival in Montgomery, and now over here. So the farmers I was speaking to, I was looking at how the livestock that we farm are also these landscape engineers. And so I met a fantastic guy who breeds Gloucester cattle. And he does it in Gloucestershire. And rather than using them for their milk, he produces fantastic beef. And he's fascinating, this dude. And he's got this theory that because the land on which he's grazing his cattle is untouched, and the Gloucester cow is untouched, was never an improved beast. He said that the Gloucester cow has evolved to live off his grass and his grass has evolved to live with the Gloucester cow. And he reckons that he had a lovely term which I wrote down, which if I was a more, if I had. Do you want to hold your coffee while you do this? No, I'm quite adept. This is my good hand. That's the good hand, is it? Yeah. He called it cultural returning. And he thinks that's what we, and he wasn't some sort of new age hippie.

Richard Prideaux: That sounds like Arts Council funding wording.

Richard Negus: Okay. Well, I quite like it because it's in other words, is that if you're using regional local breeds on local land, he reckons that they have truly evolved to work on this. You know, like everyone wants to use Dexters and belted Galloways at the moment. In all this restorative thing and they're putting bloody conic ponies everywhere, yet on Dartmoor they want to kill them all. His theory is the fact that the land has evolved to best suit these regional breeds and that they are lower in stress and almost their whole DNA has worked with that. So they taste sweeter, they taste better if they're on the land where they're supposed to be. So, one would argue, for example, that we keep using belted Galloways in projects in Suffolk and we're turning our backs on the Suffolk Redpole. Should we be doing that? Because Suffolk meadows have evolved to have Suffolk Redpole. What's your local breeds around this sort of way? Various, various.

Richard Prideaux: Holsteins and Friesians and dairy milk producers. But the one the farm we're going to see after next will be Redpoll. So you've got Welsh Redpolls here.

Richard Negus: Yes, because Redpoll though was a thing that seemed to be everywhere and they'd go, that's a Suffolk Redpoll. What's the difference? He's from Suffolk, boy, so he's better than Norfolk Pole, you know, so.

Richard Prideaux: Just where you buy them from, mate.

Richard Negus: So what's the score with this? I just touched on that. Dartmoor Ponies. So someone wants to go a massive cull of Dartmoor ponies. Who, why, and what on earth is going on there? Because your mother got Dartmoor's.

Richard Prideaux: No, she's got Welsh ponies. No, she's got Welsh ponies. She's got. Arabs. All sorts of things. What's she got, Amy?

Richard Negus: They've all got Irish drums.

Richard Prideaux: OK, yeah. But also a hunting type stuff. Yeah, but there's Welsh Hill ponies over there. There are some Mid Wales wild ponies as well. They're they don't they're closer to like Porvolski Neolithic horses almost the wild ponies. There's not they're so hardy and they are they behave more like goats than horses, but the Dartmoor wild ponies. Depends where you are on Dartmoor, they're either completely feral creatures or they're just the thing at the end of the garden almost. And it seems the attraction, the thing that people have in connection with the wild pony as a human seems to be more about the ones they see every day. It's a bit like sort of urban foxes. To a lot of people in towns, foxes are the cute thing that lives at the end of the railway line or the bottom of the garden or something. Nothing to do with the complete killing machines that they have around here. So the wild ponies in Dartmoor are either the ones that are right next to people's towns and the roads and the stuff they see regularly, or the big feral things up on the hills. But the ones near the towns are the ones people are attached to. But they're not the ones I think people want to get rid of for the grazing and the biodiversity issue on the upland.

Richard Negus: So this is yet again another thing they're saying that they're overgrazing. You see, the thing that I'd say about ponies is that if you look at cattle and sheep, they'll go crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, and they will eat their way through it. Ponies are browsers.

Richard Prideaux: Yes.

Richard Negus: So they are doing the lawns and ruffs, which I thought all these people wanted to do. I mean, I.

Richard Prideaux: Anyone who's ever had cared for horses knows that they'll just decide they don't want that half of the field. They'll stand by the gate looking mournful until you bring them hay or haylage or whatever, and they'll ignore stuff at the bottom. And wild ponies do have that to a degree, they will be very selective in what they can also only get to certain areas. And like sheep, which will get to pretty much everywhere. It's I think it's just that the idea of grazing is an issue for removal of these things because there is this belief that it is grounded in some reality that if you take away grazing animals you will have trees. Trees will come back naturally. And that's true because everything is trying to return to forest in the UK. Anywhere inland is trying to become a forest again. Even our little fire pit there.

Richard Negus: Yes, it's got a little oak growing in it.

Richard Prideaux: Tree has planted itself and has started growing.

Richard Negus: Yeah.

Richard Prideaux: And all around us is weed trees, stuff that's trying to grow naturally. That's what would happen in that field out there if you took away grazing animals. It's what would happen in the Welsh mountains if you took away grazing animals, but not all of it. So if you're taking away grazing animals, whether it's sheep or horses, you've got to decide, OK, I am deciding that this should be woodland. This should be woodland and not what it is now. Which is effectively just management. Just in the same way, if you said, I don't want this to be woodland, I want this to be grazing land. That's just a decision of equal magnitude. But there's this perception that trees good, trees better.

Richard Negus: And this is what I don't, this is slightly the reason for writing this book, because, you know, we have to accept the fact that our landscape looks the way that it does, because it more or less evolves Because of farming. I think I've started off as saying it starts with the radical concept that Britain is not the tail end of a natural disaster. It's actually the result of man-made brilliance. Bill Bryson, you know, he writes about Britain and he said, you know, by accident, the beautiful, irreplaceable British countryside was created by man. And I don't like this idea that they are removing that human element, that they are saying that the pony that is there is going to be removed. And yet the same people are arguing about that, the same ones who get absolutely, when they go and get some flipping horse from, what's it called, the Conig pony.

Richard Prideaux: What is a Conig pony cool? But Poor old Dartmoor's aren't. Well, there's this shifting baseline thing as well. It's a bit like the sort of post-war, post-Second World War improvement in tree cover. People would look at the, and we just had the Woodland Trust tree equity score thing, which I admire the Woodland Trust for doing, because it's quite a canny way of categorising a problem in relationship to people, because that's what you need to do to get funding. I understand that. Anyone looking at it and paying attention to it for the first time will go, oh God, we haven't got any trees, we haven't got any woodland. Whereas if you looked at the woodland cover in 1947 and compared it to 2017, we have a hell of a lot more. But if you are starting at 2017 and saying, well, that's... That's what we need to fix, then it doesn't matter what came before because the problem starts now. And you've got this shifting baseline of, okay, whatever is the new normal, we'll judge everything from that. And for the British Isles, rather than judging it against, okay, maybe how it looked in the middle of the 19th century, which was after the first flush of the Industrial Revolution where we got rid of a lot of woodland because we were burning it all or using it to make all the things for the Industrial Revolution and the growing cities. What we need, what you need to do is look at it in comparison to what you want it to be maybe, or what it has been and say actually we are improving things if you want more woodland. If you want more biodiversity, things are gradually getting better. But if you're comparing Britain as it is today to rural Finland or North America or something like that and saying, we don't have these vast tracts of wilderness, so we therefore we are the most biodiversity depleted, what's the most sheep wrecked chemicals?

Richard Negus: Sheep wrecked chemicals soaked in wasteland, the most, yes, the naturing crisis. Oh, God, yes. But you just add some yet more doom and gloom scroll on there.

Richard Prideaux: Compare this to the rainforest of Central America.

Richard Negus: Yes.

Richard Prideaux: We are, but we aren't. It's not as bad as it was, and it's getting better.

Richard Negus: Well, it's like Patrick Galbraith said when he wrote his last book, Uncommon Ground. He said, you know, there's always so much this narrative that Right to Rome go bimbling on about that, you know, the British public has shut out of all bar 9% of, you know, shut out of 80%. Nine, who can they get on 9%? He said he went to one of these places where they were sort of pointing the finger at some earl or duke or lord or something or other. And he went for a bimble along the footpaths that were open, then went through onto the open access land that had been given. And he bumped into a guy from, I think it was Nigeria. And he had a conversation, because Patrick's one of these people who just talks to anybody, especially when he's in book researching mode. And this guy from Nigeria went, isn't this amazing? We can just go everywhere. Back at home, we can't go anywhere. And, I think if you are told by people who have either a plausible voice, a loud voice, or one that is hysterical enough, then you can be, you can start believing that we are the most nature depleted country in Europe. And then we're just not. And we aren't. It's A farce. But the whole thing is a modelling system. And most of our thing, I say, is that we'll plot this and then we'll create a model because we're so rubbish. I was speaking with Roger Morgan Grenville last week down in Sussex at a little event run by an organisation called Greening Arundel. And firstly, we went into a really rubbish pub. I think we sometimes do a little bit of advertising by mistake here. I'm going to do some advertising by advice here. Don't go into the eagle in Arundel.

Richard Prideaux: The eagle in Arundel.

Richard Negus: The eagle in Arundel. Unless you want to watch the racing. That is on all the time. But anyway, I said to these guys, they're about the biodiversity intactness index and how we were told that we are the most nature-depleted country in Britain, but we're not. Because they asked me the question, which I get asked so much, is all right, for guys like you and I, who can actually do this for a living. But what can you do if you're either too old, you don't want to change career, you can't change career. You want to stay doing, how can you do it? And I said, well, do you know, the most important thing I think that you can do is you can start getting involved with farm clusters, with individual farms, and you can start becoming that data recorder. If your thing is bats or your thing are moths, doesn't matter what species it is. If you show a genuine interest, I know around my way most farmers with a pretty gentle approach would say, yes, I'm quite happy for you to go and record Swift's numbers here. And then you get real data because nearly everything that we have in this country, whether it's... Trees, whether it's hedgerows or whether it's nature, wider nature, is recorded through modelling, not actually through genuine people going out and recording it. And I think what that would probably show is that there are some counties, Lincolnshire, which has a lot less tree cover. And so that theoretically we say, do we need to put more trees in Lincolnshire? Is it what Lincolnshire wants? Arguably not, because huge reasons why so much of Lincolnshire hasn't got trees on is because it used to be under the sea. But we can then start getting localised regional patterns and we can get some true, honest data. And so I advise people, you don't need to just come out on hedge laying courses. Yes, if you want to learn how to lay a hedge, give you or me a call and we'll go and do it. But you can get a mark one set of eyeballs that you were born with and a field guide and a book and you can record that data and that is then hugely valuable and gives that localised data which always top trump some stupid modelling that's been thrown out by Tony Juniper and Natural England and a bunch of scientists sat in flipping Kensington in the Natural History Museum.

Richard Prideaux: Well there's also people have put a lot of effort into trying to convince other people that their way of seeing things is the right way. Their understanding of the situation is this: Elon Musk is an evil man because he's a trillionaire, or this other person is a good person because they're poor, or because when they work for non-profits, therefore they're better than this person. Rather than seeking to understand, I want to understand more about this thing. I now think I have a clear idea of how this system works. I'm now going to go and check that. I'm going to go and find out more because I'm probably wrong. And that's how I try and think about things now and how I try and see things now. I want to understand more because the closer you look at something and the more you study something and the more you look at you really look at one field, one area and say, I'm really going to get into the species survey for this. I'm going to throw my survey squares out, do my transects and go, oh, bloody hell, I didn't know we actually had this. We had three different types of orchids in this woodland. I didn't know we had or whatever. You will find more things the more you try to understand it. And if you are somebody with an agenda in what you're trying to push, which is basically every human being on earth, because that is part of human nature, you are trying to optimise for something, you are trying to do something, you're trying to achieve something. If you're watching or listening to this and thinking, yes, but I don't have an agenda, you're wrong, you do have an agenda. Even if it's just you want your family to do well or you want your people to do well, whatever it is. You can find something in such a diverse landscape as the British Isles to prove every agenda. So the bit we were looking at before you came here, we went to a farm near where I live, huge farm, 1000 cows, big dairy operation, and they rent a lot of ground around it for silage. Although, really, when you get to a sort of a dairy operation of that size, also what you're looking for is land to put slurry onto, because then you can take the silage from it afterwards, but you need to have somewhere to put that waste. And the fields you went to, I know quite well, and they've got really good hedges, haven't they?

Richard Negus: Yeah, lovely hedges. Not A1. Not A1.

Richard Prideaux: No.

Richard Negus: And you see, that would be it, because if your metric that you were judging things was the hedge, you would say, it's got mixed species, thick from bottom to top, you obviously haven't got a deer problem here. You're all that good stuff, so therefore you would say, click, that works. But then you only have to go two strides out from the hedge, and you say, God, the land is desiccated. If you walk through a field after harvest in the supposed chemical-soaked wasteland of East Anglia, you would see, running through the stubble, you would see countless myriad of small spiders, beetles, and other invertebrates. I didn't see one, not one.

Richard Prideaux: And we did a couple of transects across, didn't we?

Richard Negus: And we both of us, because this is how we work, is that most of the time we're looking at our feet. What's down there? What's run through that and you are not seeing it. Now, that though would give the message to the people who say that cows are basically nothing but disastrous. That would be saying, yes, see, look, cattle, but it's not the cows' fault. We then came round the corner and we then saw another field to our left and all of a sudden the birdsong, because all we could hear was basically rooks and crows, magpies. We saw one \*\*\*\* pheasant who went, run. And what he was doing out there, I don't know, because he doesn't have a lot to eat. But anyway, we didn't see anything there, but we walked one field, and to our left, there were then cows actually grazing out in a meadow, and there was a whitethroat that flew into the hedge. Then you see a number of other bird species, and the birdsong suddenly started, which QED meant that because there was cattle actually out in the fields, not just their aftermath spread on it. So you're going to go and say, well, surely the cattle are making a massively positive impact here.

Richard Prideaux: But both of those are cow farming.

Richard Negus: Cow farming, yeah.

Richard Prideaux: But one completely different, completely different scales, completely different operations, but both come into the same category.

Richard Negus: Correct. So therefore this carte blanche thing is get rid of the cows and everything's fine, the sort of Dale Vince nonsensical gibberish. I do think one of the other problems though is that when you go out and you start genuinely looking, you do your transects, you go and put your little metre square out and start counting species diversity or you go out, if you go out with an entomologist and they're sort of armed with hundreds of little clear plastic tubs that they put things in and they have this knowledge of it, you suddenly realise that there is a lot out there. And so most of the time what tends to happen is that we are going out and we're doing this and you're trying to prove that there is stuff there. But positivity tends to not actually raise money. So what we are trying to do when it comes to things like farm clusters and getting funding out with government funding, you're trying to say, look, we've done all this work and now we have got more farmland birds, or we've got more turtle doves, or we've got more of adders, grass, snakes, whatever it might be. You're trying to go and say, look, my work has done this. All too frequently, the NGOs and people who have got a different agenda, they want to show what isn't there. So therefore modelling, particularly models that say back before we industrialized in this country, we had a lot of nature and now we don't. It's much easier to use that model because the model tends to be doom and gloom. And doom and gloom is much more likely to raise you a few quid, isn't?

Richard Prideaux: It? Is. You only get money for solving a problem, really. Particularly if you're a charity or a social enterprise or you're a campaigning organization, you need to say, this is a problem, If you give us money, we will fix that problem. And then that disincentivizes you from ever solving a problem. Because what you need to do is say, we solved this problem, but never mind that. Here's a new problem. Here's a new problem. And then we need your money to solve that. And everything has to be a crisis. Everything has to be very, very urgent. Because again, you don't get money to say, this sort of thing is looming on the horizon maybe in the next 50 years. Can we slowly solve it now? It needs to be, no, we need to solve it by next June or everything's dead.

Richard Negus: Yeah.

Richard Prideaux: It's that level. And again, I understand why funders do that and that's maybe the best way to allocate funding, but it does incentivize a certain way of communicating with the public.

Richard Negus: Yes, it does. And it also incentivizes people, like you say, to always is You almost get doom fatigue because.

Richard Prideaux: Doomerism.

Richard Negus: Doomerism. Oh, God. You know, everything's a cost of living crisis. What? People just going to say, do you know what, we're a bit skint at the moment because, you know, we've basically spent all the money on COVID and then trying to help Zelensky not go and not go and get overrun by Ivan the Terrible. If we actually just said we're a bit skint at the moment, I can't come out on the \*\*\*\* this week because I haven't got enough money in my wallet, people go, oh, but no, it's a cost of living crisis. So you need that layer that thick on with a trowel.

Richard Prideaux: You see this with things like access to nature and access to outdoor spaces because my career was working as an outdoor instructor, working in the outdoors, taking people into the outdoors. I do firmly believe that people do need access to nature because it's why now we both work in the outdoors. The reason you don't work in an office all winter and you stand on a damp, windswept bit of Suffolk land bending wood over is because you're outside and you don't have to see people. And a lot of people go into the outdoors for that. But you can't have all spaces for outdoor recreation. You can't have everything being for fun. Because that land also has to be where we keep our wildlife, and that needs space and time, where we grow our food, and that needs space and time. And it needs to be where our rivers are and the buffer that stops all the crap getting into the rivers and things like that. So this land that we're on has to do all sorts of things. So maybe have bits designated for certain things. Or the access is managed and that's what we do here with this woodland. We take people, it's copies and gradually return it to copies. We've already been managing it for two years, but we're starting to work on the edges there. It's a bit like moving into a house with an existing garden. Don't touch it for a year, find out how it works and then decide how you're doing it. So now we're sort of making the glades there and managing it and stuff. But we also bring people here. This little camp we've got here, we train groups and we bring chefs here. And that little stump there is for chopping kindling. We had a guy, he came with a group of chefs. So it's not a chef, but you know, they work in hospitality. So it's not high-end fine gourmet dining. It's really good food, great people, but it's more every day. And they came here, their employer paid for them to come here. And We found out later that he'd had a death in the family very, very recently and he wasn't really up for this. But when he came here and found out he could just spend all day chopping kindling on that block there and just people would bring him tea and biscuits all day, that's brilliant. He was made-up and that sort of, just being able to spend time out here because it's a nice place.

Richard Negus: Why wouldn't you want to?

Richard Prideaux: Birdsong, it's green, there's lots of oxygen. He was made better by being in this place. I want to do that for as many people as possible, but if you made this woodland open access, everyone can wild camp, you can do whatever you want here. It wouldn't be this place.

Richard Negus: You didn't hear that bird song for a start.

Richard Prideaux: No.

Richard Negus: Interestingly, a recurring theme. You know, I've been talking a lot of places in the last couple of weeks whilst I've been on my tour of Britain doing research.

Richard Prideaux: Does wife remember what you look like?

Richard Negus: When I get home, I'll give her a nasty shock, won't I go, Hello, who the hell are you? Go and get out.

Richard Prideaux: She's all she's got is the photos from the wedding and you look younger.

Richard Negus: It's a lot younger and less bearded and a lot less grey and also a lot less fat. But interesting, well, I don't like to say, but you at least have got the excuse, you've got a metal leg now, whereas I'm just saying I can't be \*\*\*\*\* to do anything anymore. You know, that's basically mine. Have you got metal legs? No, I just like beer, really.

Richard Prideaux: We had three pints last night, that was.

Richard Negus: And also a Wetherspoons breakfast.

Richard Prideaux: Yes. The most calorific thing known to man. Lovely.

Richard Negus: It's brilliant. Anyway, one of the recurring themes that kept coming up and people saying, and they're sort of, and these are usually people who go to literary festivals and things like this. We're not talking about thickies. They're bright, well-read individuals from diverse backgrounds. But all of them are saying, what can you do to help us get all these NEETs?

Richard Prideaux: Not in education, employment or training.

Richard Negus: How can we get these young people out and working with you? And I'll tell them, I'll do a bit of doom-mongering saying, well, the apprenticeship schemes do not work for me. It's not that they don't just work for me financially. They literally do not work of how they're set up because of the seasonality of my work. But also they don't work because Things like, I would need to have a portaloo. If I took a bunch of kids out there, I would need to pay from my own pocket for a portaloo because that would be demanded and expected. I would need to go and put all these young people through various courses so they could use the tools necessary. And you know, when every time you've got to go and redo your chainsaw certificates, it's an expensive thing. The insurers, I spoke to my insurance company and I said, can't really do it. There is no way when he said, this is how much it's going to cost, I thought, well, that's not going to fly either. So there are all these financial barriers, which is why they end up, if they have any opportunities at all, they go to big charities where the people who are giving the core instruction know about as much about coppicing or hedge laying as I do about brain surgery.

Richard Prideaux: Yeah.

Richard Negus: And we are missing out the ability to train young people on the job.

Richard Prideaux: I have a folder in my phone which is just screenshots people have sent to me from the forestry industry out of annoyance, of social media posts from charities who do coppicing sessions in the winter and things like that. Come coppicing with us and it's the coppice stool afterwards.

Richard Negus: Yeah, up here.

Richard Prideaux: And it's got jaggy bits sticking up. I've got forestry friends who just send me this going, have you seen the state of this? Because what they want, that willow behind you, it should be that high off the ground and flat or even slightly sloped and that's it. And that's how it should be because they know it from the industry because they do it day in or day in day out through the winter. Whereas if you work for a wildlife trust or something like that, This might be one of 20 different things you have to do within your role. And this is just what you're doing that week. I mean, you'll see tomorrow at one of the farms we're going to, you'll see the results of some mechanical hedge laying done by a, I won't say which group it was, by a charity that had volunteers out to do hedge laying activities. And my friend was one of the instructors and he was doing the normal hedge laying at the top, Phil. And then there was someone else doing the mechanical hedge laying. And what the mechanical hedge laying has ended up with is trees, huge trees like this, drop down in a line with nothing growing up in between. So now you have a half dead tree on the ground with shoots coming up out of it, which sort of makes a row of more trees, but it doesn't make a good hedge because there's nothing there to lay now, unless you bury that and make that part of the bank. When you go to lay it again, you have to cut out all the woods and all the sideways bits. So when you go back to do that again, there'll just be even fewer trees than we had before. So mechanical hedge laying sort of works, but only if you do it properly and you know what you're doing.

Richard Negus: Exactly. And I find that this is an issue because you'll hear loads of politicians at the moment, they have realised that there are lots and lots of young people who not only are not in employment or education or training, But they are also getting chronically depressed. So they are adding to the welfare bill because they have never, and as you say, that bloke you were talking about was chopping kindling there. He felt better about being out doing this. We have got aspirations from the government to plant bloody 47.

Richard Prideaux: It's millions and millions and millions of trees that we haven't got in this country.

Richard Negus: No, that we don't even grow. So therefore, why are they not thinking, well, okay, well, let's look at all these aspirations we've got that require huge human resources. And then if you were bringing these people into work and getting trained, then we might actually succeed. I mean, because you could get rid of Miliband's stupid run to net zero. If you actually made, you had more of these woods coming back into rotational coppice because they would breathe that bit better. If you supported the forestry industry better, it would work. If you actually had the human resources there to do it, well then you would probably be able to do it without littering the countryside with these fatuous bits of Chinese plastic and metal called, solar power stations. Because I always think that. If you actually call the solar farm, what it is, it's a power station. What's the fuel does it burn? The sun. Then people go, I ain't having that anywhere near me. But if you go and say, you can have a solar farm, don't worry. You almost imagine the word farm makes you think of The darling buds are made, isn't it?

Richard Prideaux: Yes, it's bucolic, wonderful landscape. Well, solar farms and solar power stations, they are, they're a solution for now, aren't they? They're sort of that thing of we must solve this problem, but also do it within our election cycle. Has to be done whilst we're still in power, so we, people know that it was us, it's our party. Whichever party it was, it's our party that did this good. And we say this on the, what's been announced today.

Richard Negus: Yes, social media ban. And also, funnily enough, I did notice that the Defence Secretary and the Armed Forces Minister resigned and the next day the Prime Minister decided to send our Marines in to go and sort of do one on a Russian tanker. So there's always this knee-jerk nonsensical staff. I mean, but it's an interesting thing if you think about it. Now you're saying, I can't work out why there are so many Alders here, all the same.

Richard Prideaux: The same height and all the same height.

Richard Negus: So someone at some point, 100 years ago, turn of the century, perhaps immediately after, perhaps they might be 1919 trees. They might be, well, we've got to get some tree cover back in. And they gave them a grant and they thought, what's going to grow in this wet wood? Alders. And they put them in. And they didn't really think, this is going to be a real pain in the \*\*\*\* for these two lunatics who are taking this wood on to try and turn this into a manageable wood is exactly the self-same stupid knee-jerk reaction of putting solar panels all over the place. Because that's fine, and they're saying to farmers, oh yes, we'll pay for 25 years, 2,500 quid per hectare, it'll be absolutely fantastic. In 25 years' time, when I will be 56, when I'll be 80, I'm going to be seeing the whole of East Anglia is there's all these lorries going to be driving around with these decrepit solar panels. And we're going to think, what are we going to do with all this stuff? We've just got a massive problem in 25 years time that we are going to have millions of tonnes of this crap to get rid of. So just kick the can down the road a bit.

Richard Prideaux: It's a. Again, it's this solution for now without this, without any thought as to what your legacy will be and understanding how we got in this situation in the 1st place.

Richard Negus: I guess that's the thing, is the fact that, you said it, everything is five-year short-termism. Minette Batters was talking at the Monty Lit Fest and she said a thing that we have repeatedly said on Country Slide, is that she's trying to work when she was head of the NFU, she was always trying to work on a much longer timeline than politicians wanted to do because they wanted the short-termism of the headline and they wanted within everything to be done and dusted within the five years that they're in, powerful. And I don't quite know how you get out of that because everything is short-termism and the countryside cannot work on these narrow little five-year windows that politicians impose on. It's not a party political thing. Every single party does it. They hope they might have more than five years, but they know they might not. So they need to do something, and almost it's \*\*\*\*\*\* the consequences. Yet people who work in forestry, people who work in farming, people who work in conservation, they cannot work on those short-termism scales and their log ahead. So I think there is only one conclusion.

Richard Prideaux: Revolution.

Richard Negus: Revolution. Basically, I'm going to write a letter to the king and say, it's time, sir. Step forward.

Richard Prideaux: Pick up the sword.

Richard Negus: Pick up the sword, pick up the mace and cast it aside and say, your loyal royalist forces are gathered, all seven of us.

Richard Prideaux: We've got the crap haircuts.

Richard Negus: We've got the crap haircuts. We've got the beards. We look slightly like... I want to be Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

Richard Prideaux: Right.

Richard Negus: I will find... Who would Callum be? I suppose he'd just carry our bags. Baldrick. Baldrick, he'd carry our bags for us. Can you imagine it?

Richard Prideaux: This... Yeah, we've got... We're going to end up with a new government any day now, because we've got an election coming up, or by-election in Makerfield, and whoever there is going to be effectively crowned prince of the next party that is in control of us. But the mindset won't change really that much on any of that thinking, that short-termism. It's basically finding out who's going to be your step-parent for the next five years. And if we are going to have parental mindset from our rulers, from our elected leaders, to, because definitely it's all elections and they're all fair and there's never any chicanery at all. If we are going to be our parents and they're going to think in that mindset, can they at least think ahead maybe to our few years down the line for us, maybe to our children and their children, rather than just thinking, well, we'll give them ice cream for dinner now because that'll make them happy.

Richard Negus: Yeah. Think ahead. I have to say, it isn't something I had on my bingo card that, how do you elect, imagine if you suddenly got someone who came here, I don't know, from a country who probably hasn't got a great knowledge of Britain. So say something like Luxembourg, and they came along and said, so how do you elect your governments here? Well, what you have to do is you have to stand for an MP in Wigan, and then you will become the leader of Britain. Is this always the way? No, but that's now the new thing. Whoever wins a seat in Wigan becomes basically, what are we, the 5th largest economy in the world? So who knew that Wigan is the absolute fulcrum of...

Richard Prideaux: See, I think we should return to, if you want to be an MP, if you want to stand as an elected member of Parliament or the Senate or anything, You, even if you're not from that area, once you stand for that place, you're there for life. You are never allowed to leave. You have to work there. You have to live there. Your children have to live there. You are stuck living in that place. And your address is published.

Richard Negus: I think you ought to have a little castle.

Richard Prideaux: People come and harangue you in the supermarket.

Richard Negus: No, I think each place ought to have a castle. I think every Thursday you basically get this conga line of people coming along with all their woes and you have to sit there on a throne type thing in judgement and you go and say, and you'll have a sort of figure saying, Mr Jones, The dog poo bin hasn't been emptied. Right, okay. Who's responsible for dog poo bins? And you're going to say, oh, well, that'll be Smithers in. Right, have him have a hand chopped off. That would be a much better Netherland lair. Exactly. Of government. And then you have a Witten every sort of year where you go along and you have to go around the king and then he can go and say, look, I'm looking at here. I'm afraid the Waveney Valley What have you managed to do then, Lord Ramsey of Waveney? Well, I've managed to ban greyhound racing and... What? Yes, and I've written a lot of letters about Palestine, my Lord. Yes, but what about the potholes that everyone's complaining about? I haven't done anything about them. Right, kill him. And then there would be another election, because basically he would have been killed because he's just banned greyhound racing and hasn't filled the potholes in. I think it'd be a brilliant, you know?

Richard Prideaux: So to recap this episode, return of feudalism.

Richard Negus: Lovely.

Richard Prideaux: You should only be allowed to access the land if you're brought there by somebody who's managing it.

Richard Negus: Yes.

Richard Prideaux: Some cows are OK, depends where they are and what they're doing.

Richard Negus: Yes.

Richard Prideaux: All politics is terrible.

Richard Negus: Yes.

Richard Prideaux: You've got another book coming out.

Richard Negus: I've got another book coming out. We haven't mentioned that enough, but yeah, we'll come on to that over that.

Richard Prideaux: Anything else have we missed? Have we missed anything else, Amy? Excellent coffee.

Richard Negus: It's quite good. And Amy's a wood nymph.

Richard Prideaux: She's a wood nymph. Yeah.

Richard Negus: So there we go. I mean, you know, that is... I met a lovely lady in...

Richard Prideaux: This is a short story because we're running out of card.

Richard Negus: I left a lovely lady called Sarah in Montgomery and she runs a business. We're going to have to get her on the show where basically she takes opinion polls of people in the land-based sector so that she can feed back to DEFRA and other government bodies what to do. And I did say to her, you must listen to Country Slide. And imagine if she just listened to this one.

Richard Prideaux: This one, yeah.

Richard Negus: This one alone. She'd go, this is what have we been missing all our lives?

Richard Prideaux: Not the horse one.

Richard Negus: No, not the horse one.

Richard Prideaux: Or Leslie Dolphin.

Richard Negus: Or Leslie Dolphin. Poor Leslie.

Richard Prideaux: Right. So I'm getting someone's flashing at me from the side saying we need to wrap this up. So the. Patreon only after show we'll record, maybe record tonight in the pub. Yeah, so we'll live for Wetherspoons. But for everyone else, thank you very much, thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and we'll see you again next time. Bye.