Grubbing-up grants and the clearing of the orchards

A standard orchard carries a few dozen large trees to the hectare. They take the best part of a decade to come into bearing, crop unevenly, and are picked from ladders or gathered from the ground by hand. The sward beneath can be grazed, which is real income, but the whole system assumes labour that is cheap and available.

By the 1950s neither assumption held. Agricultural wages had risen, the rural labour force was leaving, and the trees planted before the First World War were reaching the end of productive life after decades of deferred maintenance. An orchard in that condition is not a going concern; it is a field with obstacles in it.

Against that, the alternatives had improved sharply. Post-war policy supported production intensification across the board, and land in arable or improved grass produced a measurable return without the ladder work. Removing the trees was, on the numbers in front of the farmer, the rational decision.

Grant support for orchard removal came in more than one form and from more than one authority over four decades. British agricultural improvement schemes of the post-war decades supported clearance and land improvement generally, and the effect of any grubbing grant is not that it makes farmers remove trees they wanted to keep. It is that it tips the marginal cases — the orchard that might have been restored, the block that was still just about paying — and it removes the cost of clearance, which is otherwise substantial.

Replanting support, where it existed, was directed at modern bush orchards rather than at standards. So the schemes did not simply subtract trees; they exchanged one kind of orchard for another, with a different structure, a different lifespan and a different ecological value.

The European part of this story is routinely got wrong, and the correction matters for cider specifically. The Community grubbing premium existed — Council Regulation (EEC) No 2517/69, paying up to 500 units of account a hectare, with a five-year ban on replanting attached — and it was aimed at a surplus of dessert apples, pears and peaches. But the implementing regulation defined what counted as an apple or pear tree for the purpose, and it excluded, in terms, trees yielding cider apples and trees yielding perry pears. A cider orchard could not be grubbed with Community money.

Two Community grubbing schemes ran, and neither of them could have reached a British cider orchard. The point is worth setting out because "the EEC paid farmers to grub up the orchards" is one of the most persistent explanations offered for what happened, and the instruments say otherwise.

The first scheme, of December 1969, is the one usually meant. Its implementing regulation opens by defining its own terms: eligible apple, pear and peach trees are healthy trees planted before 1965 that yield ordinary dessert fruit, and it then names the exclusions — for apple trees, those yielding cider apples; for pear trees, those yielding perry pears. Standard trees as such were in scope, with their own minimum of twenty-five to be grubbed and a notional hundred square metres apiece, so the carve-out is about the fruit and not about the shape of the tree. It was deliberate.

The timing rules Britain out in any case. As extended, applications under that scheme closed on 1 February 1973 and the grubbing itself had to be finished by 1 April 1973. The United Kingdom acceded on 1 January 1973, which left a British grower one month to apply and three to fell.

The second scheme, of April 1976, ran while Britain was a member and was narrower still: it paid for grubbing apple trees of Golden Delicious, Starking Delicious and Imperatore, pear trees of Passe Crassane, and whatever had been planted to pollinate them. Four dessert cultivars in surplus. Nothing in a Herefordshire orchard qualified.

So the British loss has to be explained by British conditions — the labour arithmetic above, domestic improvement and clearance support, and the simple fact that a worn-out standard orchard was worth less than the field under it. That is a less satisfying story than a directive from Brussels, and it is the one the documents support.

A traditional orchard is a habitat, not just a crop. Old standard trees carry deadwood, rot holes, epiphytes and a specialised invertebrate fauna that a twenty-year-old bush tree cannot support, and the unimproved grassland beneath adds another layer. Traditional orchards are recognised in the United Kingdom as a Priority Habitat for precisely this reason.

Genetic diversity went with them. Farm orchards held local varieties that existed nowhere else and had never been catalogued, and clearance took those out without record. The cultivar conservation work of the following decades exists because of what was removed in these ones.

The landscape effect is the one people notice. Counties whose character had been defined by grazed orchards for centuries lost that character within a generation, and the loss is irreversible on any timescale that matters, because a standard orchard cannot be re-created quickly.

It is tempting to write this history as a policy failure, and in ecological terms it was one: public money removed a Priority Habitat before there was any framework that recognised it as such. But the schemes were not designed against orchards. They were designed to raise food output and later to correct fruit surpluses, and orchards were caught by instruments aimed at other things.

The farmers who took the grants were not making a cultural choice. They were running businesses in which an unproductive orchard was a liability, and the alternative to grubbing was usually not restoration but continued decline.

What the episode does show is how quickly an incentive structure can dismantle something that took centuries to build, and how little of the value at stake was visible in the accounts anyone was keeping at the time.