Hedgerows and tillage farmers would appear to be as incompatible as grease guns and your Sunday best. Hedges are seen as a nuisance, a breeding ground for weeds and particularly cleavers, a plant whose sole purpose in life is to wrap around the crop divider.

Headlands also harbour hidden stones and roots and other perils to the combine harvester. Overhanging boughs smash the combine’s mirrors. If the hedge is a bit high and shady, it’s even worse. The headland grain sample will be full of plump green grains which drive the moisture content sky-high.

So for these reasons I’ve always been a bit antagonistic towards hedgerows and eliminated them where possible. I’ve obliterated them with the zeal of US Air Force heavy bombers in the reckless pursuit of ever larger fields which now average 25 acres.

Okay, it’s far from a prairie, but it’s a comfortable average. Deep drainage watercourses limited any further increase. And, it has to be said, the early years of Area Aid in the 1990s actively encouraged this policy; the greater the area you ploughed, the more money you received.

But lest you think me an ecological vandal, I think our portion of the countryside has a tidy look. There are others who have been more ruthless, if you’ll forgive the pun. In my defence, I’ve planted hundreds of metres of hawthorn and 60ac of hardwood forestry. Of course, it has become practically a crime to remove a hedge. Under the European Commission’s Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC), and greening measures, hedges have become a valued resource.

There are now farms with insufficient Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs), which hasn’t been a problem until this year as beans could be used as an EFA substitute. But now that’s all changed, making even more hedges necessary.

But I don’t want to bore you with the environmental gospel according to the EU. Instead I’m taking my information from another source.

The EU does not have a good record here, as first it encouraged us to pull out hedges and now they think it’s a good idea to keep them. So, I’ve been reading about hedgerows and it was with ever-increasing guilt that I turned the pages of A Natural History of the Hedgerow by John Wright.

Some hedgerows may be extraordinarily old; 10 different woody species in a hedge length of 30m, by Hooper’s Rule, suggest it may be 1,000 years old.

I think we may have such a hedgerow. They are vitally important linking corridors for biodiversity. Amazingly, there are in excess of 2,000 different species of plant, animal, lichen and fungus in just 100m of a good old-fashioned high hedgerow with a bank and ditch. All of these species use the hedgerow as either a perch, a home or a food source.

Insects predominate, with more than 1,700 of these and 125 plants. The balance is made up of invertebrates like slugs, snails and spiders, and then there are vertebrates, which includes the birds. The aphids and the flea beetles probably overwinter there awaiting summertime and a host plant or crop nearby, not to mention the 13 different types of slugs and snails.

Now you may well say that’s the very reason I’m getting rid of these wretched hedges – without them there’d be fewer pests. That’s possibly true, but by reducing the quality and quantity of our hedgerows we are also reducing the habitat for natural predators of these pests.

So am I a poacher-turned-gamekeeper? Perhaps a little, but put it this way – if I won the Lotto and bought a big spread, I’d still do a bit of hedge re-alignment on the QT. Except if it was in 100 acre fields already.

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