Bracken & Cattle

Belted Galloways mashing up a stand of bracken

What with all the current legal difficulty around the chemical control of bracken, it was refreshing to see an old-fashioned management technique being profitably employed on a Galloway hillside. By dropping a ring-feeder on a stand of bracken, the Belties are forced to congregate in such greedy abundance that they literally pulverize the bracken litter. Some of the root rhizomes which make bracken such a hardy and difficult species to manage will have been directly exposed to frost and cold weather by this action, and others will become vulnerable once the layer of dead litter which usually keeps them insulated has been broken up and removed.

Bracken rhizomes are extremely vulnerable to the cold, and the area around this ring-feeder will have much less in the way of bracken when May comes. Rhizomes can descend up to a metre into the soil, so while this kind of control does not guarantee 100% removal of the plant, it does make a difference. Besides, the nature of bracken "control" is not to annihilate the plant altogether; just prevent it from encroaching at the expense of other interests. If the ring-feeder is moved around over the course of the winter, it could clear off quite a significant amount of bracken, and this is a traditional means of keeping the plant in check.

Not everyone can afford to keep hardy native breeds like Belted Galloways, and the number of wintering cows in the hills has fallen dramatically over the last twenty years. This loss is a major contributing factor to the huge proliferation of bracken in many areas, and explains why chemical control has become so vital in the ongoing battle against this invasive species.