Eoghan Daltun Farming For Nature Ambassador

My name is Eoghan Dalton and I'm originally from Dublin but we're down near Eyries in the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. I bought a farm here over 12 years ago. It's a 73 acre farm of which about 40 acres is a share of mountain commonage. What attracted me to the land was the fact that it had been disused for a long time so a lot of the land naturally went back to native forest. I'm allowing that process to continue but I'm also high nature value farming with Dexter cattle both on private ground and also on the mountain commonage that this farm has shares in. I have 21 and a half acres under the native woodland scheme where it's fenced off to deer and so on and it's regenerating inside the fence. So Dexter cattle, yeah I think they're much more suitable to this type of ground than sheep are. They're certainly much more friendly to the ecology, to the native ecology of the area. Because they're not selective grazers so wild sheep for example will graze out any native trees that are coming up or other important flora. Cattle don't do that, they eat a little bit of everything including grass which is much more benign impact on the ground they're grazing. So this area the cows were grazing this area over the winter when the leaves were off the trees and the reason why I do things in that way is because that way the cows don't damage the trees and it allows the process of natural regeneration of the trees to to carry on unimpeded. If you look at all the all of these trees that are all around me here these weren't here five or six years ago and none of them were planted. They all self-seeded in and if you look around you can see there's a great variety there's there's rowan or mountain ash and there and there's a bunch of birch here that's downy birch is the is the species you get here. Here's oak, couple of oaks here and you've got about a dozen different species coming up all over the the ground but they're coming up these are wild trees they're not they're not from garden centers they're they're the trees that probably have existed in this part of of the country right back till not long after the last ice age. What I'm doing here I consider to be very high nature value farming really the the biodiversity and nature is my primary focus here food production is secondary for me. When this area was grazed by sheep none of none of these plants were here all of this appeared after I took the sheep out and started putting in the cattle in but only in the winter. There was a a huge kind of a renaissance not only large flowered butterworth but dozens of other species of wildflower sprang up all over the all over the place particularly in but not only and and the the transformation was really amazing. Where we are now this is what you would describe as tempered rainforest. When I came here if you were to if it were possible to roll back the clock by 12 years where we're standing right now would have looked very very different because the whole place from about my head height down was completely stripped bare by feral goats sika deer and various domestic animals sheep and cattle. So you had none of the the flora all around me in other parts of the forest there are carpets of wildflowers and all of this sprang up after the land was fenced to keep the herbivores out. Because there are no extractive processes going on here this area is entirely left for nature. I consider this to be a form of rewilding that I'm practicing here. What I've seen with what I've done with the land here gives me great cause for hope because I've seen that when you take the pressure off the land the land will come back to life in in a massive way. An important part of the definition of rewilding is that there are no extractive activities involved. Farming of its essence has to be an extractive process because we're removing food from the land. That's why on the other side of the coin I'm practicing high nature value farming. I think they're both equally essential to turning around the biodiversity emergency that we're in.