Protecting the flowery uplands of the Burren

Europe's farm policy has moved a long way towards a view of the countryside that keeps agriculture in balance with natural diversity, animal welfare and the value of landscape to a wider society. In the Republic it is Teagasc, the State's farm and food development authority, that has had to shake off an obsession with intensive production and attend to its impact on nature.

From an era of unhealthy intimacy with the agrochemical industries, Teagasc has been catching up fast on the new and greener directions of EU rural policy. Its role in REPS, the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, is having wide and positive effects in the countryside. Its organic research farm, set up at Johnstown Castle, Co Wexford, in 1990, has vindicated organic methods.

A further welcome sign of changed attitudes is Teagasc's partnership in the first Irish journal of agri-environmental research. Tearmann is published by the faculty of agriculture at University College Dublin in association with Teagasc, and a committed ecologist, John Feehan, is senior editor.

Its mission is "enhancing the natural and cultural diversity of the Irish rural environment through better understanding and practice".

If Tearmann had existed 20 years ago, we might have avoided the gross overgrazing of the western hills that caught Teagasc's organisation in such ignorance and denial. Even today, the overstocking and erosion of western blanket bogs and uplands remains a real problem - one addressed by the new journal in a paper on the satellite monitoring of peatland.

By an irony, however, it is the reverse of overgrazing that figures in the journal's main case study. Changes in traditional farming in the Burren are threatening to submerge its flowery uplands in a spreading tide of hazel scrub.

The Burren's striking beauty and ecological fascination are not at all the "natural" phenomenon that many visitors suppose. It was primal forest clearance and overgrazing that exposed so much bare limestone in the first place, the soil washing away down cracks in the rock. At various times since the Bronze Age, retrenchments in farming have allowed hazel - a tough, pioneering tree species that once covered most of this island - to expand across the thin, dry soil.

Photographs in the study by Brendan Dunford and John Feehan show examples of how hazel has regenerated in the past century at places such as Corkscrew Hill (mostly bare rock in 1900), and the churches at Oughtmama. Almost half the region's farmers see hazel scrub as a problem on their holdings.

The reasons for hazel's spread lie in vanished traditions that once kept the scrub in check. Hazel was, at one time, an invaluable material for a half-dozen farm uses, from baskets to fencing, fodder and fuel: nobody besides the odd theme-park charcoal-burner bothers to harvest it now.

Goats, once kept on most Burren farms, have been abandoned and allowed to join the large, free-ranging herds on the hills, where they browse on hazel but move on without chewing it down. The older, hardier breeds of cattle had a greater appetite for scrub than their well-fed counterparts today. And new modes of husbandry are drawing the animals down from traditional upland ranges.

Farmers are switching to suckler cows of continental breeds and are rearing high-quality weanlings for the European market. More than half of them now farm part-time, using slatted houses, ring-feeders and baled silage to keep cattle at hand. As farmland is concentrated into fewer, bigger holdings - with an ever-growing emphasis on easy access and convenience - the long Burren tradition of upland wintering of hardy shorthorn and Hereford cattle is vanishing.

Over the past decade, the spread of scrub has been accelerating. It threatens to shade out the diversity of flower-rich grassland and to engulf tombs and other archaeological monuments. Once hazel grows as tall as a man it is impervious to grazing, and the use of mechanical diggers to clear it can wreck the ecology of weathered rock and soil.

Dunford and Feehan want to involve farmers in a long-term strategy to check the further spread of scrub in ecologically friendly ways. This will need decisions of conservation regarding the proper balance between areas of scrub and of grassland and heathland in the Burren as a whole. Much of the older hazel woodland is, of course, an ecosystem to be treasured in its own right - rich in orchids, mosses and lichens.

Great tracts of the "natural" limestone landscape at the lowland margins of conservation areas have already been cleared mechanically to create fertilised ryegrass pastures. How are the precious uplands within and beyond the Burren's national park to be managed with the traditional light winter grazing that seems the ideal?

One solution may be to extend the farmers' conservation remit, under REPS, to stocking the uplands with the older, hardier breeds, with compensation for income forgone. (In a complementary paper on Burren grazing pressure, the botanist Grace O'Donovan suggests that native Kerry blacks or Highland cattle crosses are even better adapted for upland grazing and scrub control.)

An encouraging conclusion from the survey is that the great majority of farmers think REPS is a good thing and is improving the general appearance of their area. That may help them get over the fact that, as the researchers put it, "farmers and farming have frequently been vilified as a threat to this environment, rather than being recognised as a vital component in its evolution".

Such positive interaction sets the tone of this journal, both where it discusses the future role of farming in relation to environment, and in its papers on issues such as hedgerow management, farming and archaeology and community involvement in management of beaches and dunes.

Tearmann will appear annually for the next two years and twice a year thereafter. Individuals pay £10 an issue (institutions £25). Contact: The Secretary, Department of Environmental Resource Management, UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4email: