Martino Newcombe runs a small farm in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland. Biodiversity is a central focus of his work. He practices conservation grazing on marshy terrain with Kerry cattle, a hardy ancient Irish dairy breed. In his stewardship of the land he is careful to heed the inherent understanding of deep ecology passed down from previous generations. In this first letter from his farm, Martino explains that you don’t have to be a cow to tell milk from cream.
Since 1995 I have managed a mixed smallholding in Galway in the west of Ireland as a wetland nature reserve. Keeping only horses there until 2022, when I introduced rare native breed cattle to mimic the actions of large herbivores. Creating piles of deadwood combined with introducing horned cattle and slowing surface water has resulted in an increase of various animal and plant species.
My work has been in a wide range of environmental areas labouring in gardens, farms, construction and forestry. I have no formal farming education nor in forestry, where I logged with horses, which are still relevant in difficult terrain and environmentally sensitive areas.
Anything I know is from word of mouth and hands on experience from specialists, neighbours or family – my Italian mother’s family were mountain peasant sheep farmers who used oxen for draught work and my Irish father’s side labourers, smiths and horsemen.
In the west of Ireland I find there has been less industrialisation of agriculture with many farming in a more traditional manner keeping small mixed holdings with off farm incomes – very often in construction where I meet them.
They never ‘dewilded’, so to speak, and there are clearly ancient farming practices contributing to biodiversity lost elsewhere which rewilding, regeneration and restoration seeks to recreate.
Some areas still speak Irish and I have just enough national school Irish to be able to decipher traditional land use. With most place (and often field) names still in Irish this gives great insight when maintaining and restoring specific land parcels. The majority of my holding is locally called riascach which translates from Irish as ‘marshy’, which it is.
Heeding the older generations’ inherent understanding of deep ecology is in my experience overlooked and undervalued, as oral cultures generally tend to be, along with the resilience that mixed smallholdings have in withstanding economic and climatic threats to food, fuel and biodiversity.
A thriving habitat
I have participated in consecutive environmental farm grant schemes since 2000. The first one, the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (REPS), had a mandatory three-day course for participants. Native tree species were covered on day one and on day two we were told one of the mandatory steps we had to take was the removal of all ivy from farmyard trees.
At that point I had only eight mature trees (all ash) on the entire holding, six of which were round the yard and covered with ivy that was teeming with wrens and bees and blackbirds so I stated I would be not destroying these habitats, specifically as the previous day we had been told that ash, of all the native trees, supported the least amount of wildlife. I was told I would be penalised financially by refusing to do this which I said I would accept rather than destroy a thriving habitat for the sake of complying with what was clearly a directive that defeated the very purpose of the scheme.
At this time, biting midges were a problem on my holding. To solve this I began planting all my fence lines with trees, doing so because of my experience when working on stonework on Galway city waterways where a popular section of river path had become unwalkable at dusk due to clouds of these insects. This occurred immediately after old trees along the path had been clear felled as they were deemed too ugly to be kept as part of an upgrading plan. Allegedly nobody had understood that these old trees were the roosts for bats, who eat at least 3,000 insects each per night. New smaller ‘prettier’ trees were put in to replace the old trees and it was a long time before people could use the path comfortably. A good local example of how disconnected planning affects land users.
Twenty-five years on I don’t have a midge problem and I still have the ivy and all the wildlife with it – but it takes a long time to fix what can be ruined in a week through misguided thinking.
Ivy does no harm to healthy trees or walls. If a tree is weak the weight of ivy will act as a sail to bringing it down sooner rather than later and if a wall is weak ivy will dig into the mortar. Ivy in fact protects structures, and is a multipurpose habitat providing food and cover for many species including bats. Believing you are doing a tree a favour by stripping it of ivy is just that – a belief, unfounded in either scientific research or practical experience and demonstrates ignorance of basic ecology and construction.
That an environmental scheme included habitat destruction is evidence that policy makers need to heed both researchers and those who actually work land. Just as academia is not the sole reserve of critical thinking, blindly accepting bureaucratic dogma is not wise. Willfully destroying ivy or any habitat because someone else believes they know better is summed up well by the late Matt O’Toole, who farmed here before me. A traditional farmer, who outwintered his much sought after fine cattle, he would smile and say: “You don’t have to be a cow to tell milk from cream.”
Deadwood by a turloch – a temporary body of water characteristic of lowlands in the west of Ireland © Martino Newcombe
Birds, bees and bison
Most plants that are our food sources need insects like bees moving between them so the plant can become fertile. The plant attracts the bee by providing its food source – nectar – and the pollen the plants need to be fertilised is carried between the plants by the visiting insects. Without this action there is no food for us or anything else.
In 2015 University College Galway research found wild colonies of the native Irish black honey bee thought to be extinct. A discovery not only of importance to the native species itself but for all European honey bee species who may be able to have some of the wild bee’s hardier traits bred back into them. This is because less domesticated breeds of livestock are closer to their wild ancestors and so are more resistant to disease and weather.
Horned cattle play the role that large herbivores like wild cattle and bison performed in the ancient forests across Europe where their browsing and movements created habitats for a myriad of wildlife to live in.
I observed this biodiverse habitat first hand in 2005 when visiting Bialowieza Forest, the last vestige of lowland primeval forest in Europe, to see how Ireland looked only four centuries ago when it was still covered in trees.
The forest was teeming with all manner of wildlife as a result of the presence of herds of bison, tarpan horses and boar alongside predators such as stoats, lynx and wolves.
The other essential difference noted was deadwood. Everywhere else people have removed deadwood thinking it good for firewood or believing it to be rubbish which needs to be cleaned up. Deadwood is the opposite – it is a precious resource that when left where it stands or falls is essential for a vast amount of wildlife to feed on or live in. All the effort put into bee, bird and bat boxes is our modern way to imitate the holes and gaps once found everywhere in our landscapes.
Ash trees standing dead across the country from ‘dieback’ disease may have a silver lining. Made safe with specialist pruning the trunks could be left standing as deadwood habitats.
Ancient farmers cut and stacked thorny branches to build livestock enclosures to keep their native cattle in and predators out. It is believed that some of these branches rooted or dropped berries which grew into living barriers – the origin of modern hedgerows that we now use on farms today.
Pruned branches from both live and dead trees can be stacked in long piles to create another modern wildlife habitat – the ‘dead hedge’.
Wolf pack observed in Bialowieza Forest, Poland, 2005 © Martino Newcombe
Ancient native breeds
Breeds of native Irish cattle, though rare, will likely be of value in the future as more domesticated imported breeds of cattle become less profitable due to rising housing, fertiliser and fodder costs or are threatened by disease they have less resistance to.
Not just saving the ancient breeds for their own sakes but for the more domesticated modern breeds who could have the native cattle’s hardier traits bred back into them – as with the bees.
Keeping small dispersed herds of native cattle around the country is not only a way to safeguard these old breeds but also manage land in a more biodiverse manner because of their grazing patterns and behaviour in what is called ‘conservation grazing’. The native breeds thrive on less fertile ground outdoors, year-round, in all weathers.
Of these only the ‘Kerry’ is a dairy breed and is considered to be the descendant of the Celtic black cattle farmed in Ireland for at least six thousand years. Farming, forests and wild places have gone hand in hand here for a very, very long time.
