Farm schemes do not fund the predator control curlew need

England’s two main farm payment schemes make no provision for predator control, the measure identified as the main immediate cause of curlew breeding failure, according to a review by the British Trust for Ornithology, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and the RSPB. The findings, highlighted by the Moorland Association on 3 August, score the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier against what breeding curlew actually require.

What did the review find on predator control?

Neither the Sustainable Farming Incentive nor Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier funds lethal predator control, and neither supports the multi-farm agreements that would allow it to work at a landscape scale. That matters because predation is not a field-by-field problem: on keepered moorland a single gamekeeper routinely covers more than 6,000 hectares, while a farm agreement covers a fraction of that.

Every Yorkshire Dales farmer interviewed for the review said they would allow lethal predator control on their land, and most were content for local gamekeepers or independent controllers to operate across neighbouring holdings. Six reported foxes and crows increasing after nearby estates lost a full-time keeper, which is as close to a controlled experiment as upland England offers.

Where do the payments pull the wrong way?

The review found options that pay more for management doing less. The Sustainable Farming Incentive grassland option CLIG3 pays £151 a hectare for management of limited value to waders, while the better targeted Countryside Stewardship option CUP2 pays £121.

Farmers also gave indicative costs for wader-friendly management. Excluding stock from a lambing field was put at about £2,400 a hectare a year, delaying a silage cut at about £1,500, and protecting a single nest by leaving an uncut patch at roughly £90. The gap between those figures and the payment rates on offer explains a good deal of the uptake problem.

What does this mean for gamekeepers and shoots?

The review is, in effect, an official acknowledgement of the argument the shooting community has made for years: that habitat work without predator control does not put curlew chicks in the air. It also puts a value on keepering that farm schemes do not currently recognise, and records farmers themselves asking for keepers to work across their ground.

For estates already funding a keeper, the review is evidence to take into any agri-environment negotiation. For areas that have lost keepering, the farmers’ accounts of rising fox and crow numbers are a direct observation of what follows.

What happens next

The authors recommend results-based payments, which reward chicks fledged rather than actions taken, and a local facilitator role to coordinate nest-finding and predator control across groups of farms. Neither is currently available through the Sustainable Farming Incentive or Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier, so both would require a scheme change from Defra.

The full review can be read through the British Trust for Ornithology, which carried out the work with the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and the RSPB. The Moorland Association’s summary of the findings is on its own site.