The Real Cost of Orthodox River Management
In 1977 the Ministry of Agriculture estimated that 6.4 million acres of agricultural land in England and Wales needed drainage.1 This, approximately one-fifth of the nation’s farmland, was expected to keep engineers in the newly formed water authorities fully occupied until well into the next century. In 1980–1, a fairly typical year, the grant from the Ministry of Agriculture for land-drainage schemes, including some urban work, amounted to about £30.5 million, of which £23.7 million was allocated to the water authorities, while the rest went to internal drainage boards and local authorities.2 In that year it is estimated that the water authorities spent around £40 million on capital drainage schemes for agriculture. In addition, all water authorities spent large sums on routine river maintenance on farmland; and still more money was spent by the Ministry of Agriculture in contributing between 30 and 70 per cent of the cost of farmers’ field drainage, designed to pick up the benefits of lowering the water level, a result of river engineering schemes.
AGRICULTURAL REASONS FOR DRAINAGE
Much of this expenditure, which has taken such a toll on both the exchequer and the environment, has been based on a simple assumption that is deeply embedded in agricultural thinking: that excess water is the enemy of good husbandry and must be driven off the land. In those places where stock is kept out in winter, undrained grassland is unusable during floods, and in summer is susceptible to trampling by animals, and so supports less stock than drained pasture. In addition, damp conditions encourage husk in cattle and fluke in sheep. For the cereal farmer, wet land is late land, since waterlogging keeps the ground cold and holds back germination. Saturated soil lacks air, without which plant roots die, helpful micro-organisms are checked, and the soil loses its structure. Roots of wheat which have been stunted by excessive water in spring will be less able to withstand a summer drought. Actual flooding can be disastrous. Depending on the time of a flood, root crops can be completely destroyed if submerged for more than twenty-four hours.fn1
AGRICULTURAL OVER-PRODUCTION
The real problems that undrained land presents to farmers have justified drainage during periods when we have been short of food. What is now questionable is the national need to produce a maximum, perfect crop on every piece of English farmland. The process whereby rivers have been straightened and lowered to allow all riverside land to be more intensively cropped for grass and grain has often been expensive in terms of both wasted investment and loss of landscape. The environmental cost has been the destruction of wetlands and the general erosion of the rural landscape, whereby hedges, woods, and ponds have been removed. The habitats that have been hardest hit by the post-war agricultural revolution are on land that was always regarded as the most marginal: the barest hilltops, the steepest hillsides, and the wettest valley bottoms. The reason why these had survived so long was because they required the most money spent on them – in the case of valley bottoms, to pay for initial drainage and then to maintain it – to make them yield their full potential of arable and pasture. Now, with the massive harvests of the 1980s, when the superabundant corn bows its head along the banks of our chastened, canalized rivers, many of those who set out to tame the flood have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. All over Europe there lingers the sweet smell of excess. In the south of the Continent, piles of surplus peaches and tomatoes are bulldozed, and cauliflowers are mixed with cod-liver oil before being buried. In the north, agricultural officials no longer discuss whether the harvest was adequate, only how the latest addition to the grain mountain can be stored. In 1985, as reported in The Times, the cost of simply storing the United Kingdom’s cereal surplus amounted to around £111 million. That same year, the agriculture commissioner for the Common Market revealed a new solution for reducing the butter mountain: feeding it back to the cows.3 fn2
With the massive harvests of the 1980s, cereal crops bow their heads over our chastened and canalized rivers.
Such is the latest outcome of forty years of enthusiastic and single-minded agriculture, of which an equally enthusiastic drainage policy has been an essential part, that conservationists are now questioning the aims of intensive river management on its own terms of hard-headed economics and efficiency. The wetlands, long regarded as wastes by generations of farmers, have been replaced by a harvest which fits the dictionary definition of ‘waste’ in every sense. Our annual surplus of grain is roughly equivalent to the annual yield of the Cambridgeshire fens, won from the flood by Cornelius Vermuyden 300 years ago. Intensive cultivation and continued drainage of the Fens further accelerate the degradation of the land, which is increasingly subject to peat wastage through oxidation and windblow.
Recently there have been determined efforts to reduce our food surpluses, but we are only starting to learn that river and land management require careful thought before instant expenditure of money. The drain-all, strip-out approach to land has been adopted by insurance firms investing in agriculture precisely because it requires no more thought than it takes to fill in a form for the subsidy. The practical reason it is wise in the long term to give much more careful thought to river and wetland management is that drainage can contain, profoundly, the seeds of its own destruction.fn3
PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION FROM RIVER ENGINEERING
The real cost of river mismanagement can begin with engineering works on the watercourse itself. As many of the old river managers learned from first-hand experience of tinkering with their rivers, it is ultimately far more productive to work with a river than against it. It is the nature of rivers that they refuse to stay straight. ‘It’s always twisted,’ said a seasoned riverman of the Shropshire Rea, ‘and it always will.’ Cage a river in cement and iron, and it will struggle to break out like a wild beast. Major straightening of the Mississippi in the 1930s, largely for navigation purposes, is still creating problems for its present-day managers over hundreds of miles. Attempts to straighten out the Lang Lang river in Australia between 1920 and 1923 caused a series of cuts into the bank, which progressed rapidly upstream and destroyed seven bridges.4
But it is not necessary to look so far afield or so long ago for examples of rivers which have refused to obey the dictates of engineers. In 1864 the river Ystwyth in Wales was straightened to run parallel to a railway track. In 1969 it was back again on its wandering course, and was engineered cheaply back into line by dredging out the gravel shoals which were causing it to wander. However, this did not turn out to be such a cheap solution in the long run, since it set up conditions of even greater instability, necessitating repeated operations every two years.5 Major work on the river Taff and the river Usk in South Wales, carried out in the early 1980s, has precipitated extensive and unforeseen repair bills. Those who win money on the horses at Kirkby Lonsdale races in Cumbria can quickly sober up if they wander down from the racecourse to see how their rates have been spent on the adjacent reaches of the river Lune, where the recently cemented banks are dramatically caving in, and attempts at bank protection appear to have made matters worse.
The river Trannon is a fast Welsh mountain stream, which flows down towards the Severn in Powys. In 1978–9 a short reach near the village of Trefeglwys was given a thorough canalizing treatment. Trees were cleared from the banks, and raised flood-banks were built out of the dredged material alongside the stream
