Labour's short-sighted farming cuts are posing big risk - this time to ancient hedgerows

Hedgerows are a construct of man. You cannot rewild a hedge because they were never wild. Archaeology reveals that by 2500BC, Britain's earliest farmers were planting rows of shrubby thorn plants, then cutting and laying them to form livestock retaining enclosures.

The traces of these early hedges can still be seen today. After harvest, when the summer sun bakes the stubbles dusty yellow, the land can reveal ancient secrets to a drone's questing camera. Dark lines, the memories of hedgerows long gone, spread out like the veins on the back of an old man's hand.

The more we Britons mastered agriculture, the more hedges proliferated.

They kept livestock in place and gifted tender crops some protection from the elements. Hedges acted as a visible boundary moreover, between parishes, estates, farms, fields and cottages. When they grew too large and shaded out growing crops, they were coppiced to the ground and allowed to regrow. If gaps appeared, enabling cattle or sheep to escape, they were filled by laid lengths.

Trees grew within the hedgerows, becoming mighty black poplars, cracked elms or curlicued oaks. Many of the lonely trees we still see standing incongruously in fields of crops, remind us that a hedge once ran there.

The farmers of yesteryear were never driven by the notion that hedgerow planting and management provided habitat for wildlife. The hedge for them was an agricultural tool, no different to a plough or hoe.

The idea our forebears were somehow at one with nature seems a little romantic. More mundanely, farmers twigged that the hedge was simply yet another example of a natural phenomena that they could harness and then master for their own ends.

Hedgerows are filled with hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple, hazel, dogwood and spindle. All happily grow together in jumbled profusion, jostling for dominance.

The hedge apes, in human-made linear form, naturally occurring scrub. Scrub plants are the secondary species found in woodland, the nursemaids of lowland England's great primary trees - oak, ash, elm, beech and hornbeam.

Hedge shrubs are precocious, sufficiently forgiving to allow man to cut them and trim to his whim, yet growing and regrowing with a speed, density and thickness that suits his needs.

It was mere happy coincidence that man's creation of the hedge suited wildlife.

Yet today a mixed hedge plays home to prolific nature.

Tree and house sparrows, yellowhammers, linnets, robins, blackcaps, whitethroats, turtle doves, thrushes, wrens, the tits and finches - be they green, chaf, gold or bull - all rear their young in the cross-work of limbs. The grey partridge and pheasant escape from raptors in its thorny understory and weave their ground nests in the hedgerow's lee. Shrews, mice and voles scurry and feed here.

The hedgehog's very name denotes its preferred habitat. In early medieval England, the hedgehog was known as a "land urchin" - prickly and edible I suppose? Rabbits and rats tunnel among the roots. Stoats and weasels in turn hunt them.

Deer shelter from the elements in their lee and badgers build their cavernous setts beneath them. Foxes take up residence when brock decides to evacuate. Inver-tebrates - beetles, aphids, bees, flies, wasps and mites - all call the hedge home.

All comers feast upon the fruit borne by the hedge in autumn. This man-made haven, created to keep cows and sheep in and wind and rain out, is so much more than a barrier. If the woods are the lungs of the land, the hedgerows are its arteries.

However wondrous the hedgerow is, history shows us that it comes and goes in our landscape according to the vagaries of the economy, farming requirements and population growth.

In the two decades after the Second World War, we lost a great number of our hedgerows. They were grubbed out by government diktat.

Politicians strong-armed farmers to maximise crop production, particularly in arable areas such as my own home county of Suffolk. Hedgerows were seen as hindrances to wheat and barley production.

The vast prairie-like fields that resulted from the demolition of the old hedges did indeed boost yields, as did the habitual use of artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. By the mid-1980s, it became clear these policies were unsustainable. Soil depletion and erosion was commonplace and multiple wildlife species were in obvious decline.

The destruction of the hedgerows denied swathes of birds, mammals and invertebrates protection from predators, denuded their food sources, lost them nesting habitat and eradicated the thorny highways that linked their world together.

As is the norm with government policies, a radical U-turn was necessary.

From the 1990s to this day the planting of new farmland hedgerows was deemed essential and funded by grants.

Often these new lines of thorn, supported with bamboo canes and guarded from deer by plastic spirals, were planted in the very places where they had been grubbed out just three decades before!

As a professional hedgelayer, I am all too aware that mine is an ancient craft. Yet, in truth, my job is one of practical hard graft with huge modern day relevance.

The hedgerow only maximises its true value for nature, and for the farmer, if it is thick from bottom to top. Such a hedgerow has more fruit and denser nesting habitat. Below ground the roots are similarly energised, meaning they more effectively retain soil, store carbon and filter chemical and fertiliser run off into water courses.

The act of laying a hedge achieves all of this and we hedgelayers are simultaneously agricultural workers and conservationists.

Hedgelaying is winter work and relatively straightforward to learn. But it takes a lifetime of repetitive practice to master - I've been laying hedges for 30 years.

Using billhook and chainsaw, I pleach the stems with a downwards diagonal cut roughly three quarters through at the base.

Laying the still living plants over at an angle of 40 degrees or more, I fill in gaps and intertwine the fronds.

I then stake this cross hatch of branches in place and secure them by twisting long binders cut from hazel across the top of the stakes. More often I "crook my pleachers" - a hedging term for a stem cut for laying - in place, securing them from the elements as they regrow with reinvigorated life.

Planting new hedgerows is undoubtedly an important activity that runs alongside my regenerative work in replenishing existing ones, and previous governments placed great emphasis on the former. The last Conservative administration set a target for 30,000 miles of new hedgerows to be planted by 2037 and 45,000 miles by 2050.

There remain serious questions over whether UK plant nurseries have the infrastructure to supply the 434.5 million plants required for such an undertaking.

But more worrying is the woeful shortage of suitably skilled workers needed to plant the new hedges and hedgelayers, such as me, who will ensure these lines of plants become meaningful hedgerows. However, it may be moot. More than 90% of my work is for farmers who rely upon DEFRA grants to fund my labour, either under Countryside Stewardship or the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI). The Labour government's spiteful decision to impose Inheritance Tax on family farms caused an immediate loss of liquidity in

the rural economy. This was further compounded by their precipitous decision to cancel the SFI, with no guarantee of

what its replacement will be, if any. The seeming intransigence of the Prime Minister and Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Agriculture, to review and reverse their decisions is devastating for farmers and hedgelayers alike.

Worse still though is the impact this will have on wildlife. For nature this Labour government is a disaster.

If our hedgerows and nature are to thrive they need a flourishing agricultural sector. I can confirm that under Keir Starmer, British farming is anything but that.

Words From The Hedge: A Hedgelayer's View Of The Countryside, by Richard Negus (Unbound, £16.99) is out now