There is always something wrong with conditions for the north of England's grouse shooters and this year it is spinach.
Not that the birds have taken to eating the stuff in the manner of Popeye to develop their ability to hit back; the connection is via a European Union decision to ban the herbicide Asulam after protests about its effect on spinach growing, largely on the Continent.
The link is that Asulam is widely used to suppress or destroy bracken, a plant so skilled at survival that it should have been named after Charles Darwin. The Moorland Association, which speaks for upland management more widely as well as grouse moor owners and users in particular, views this in apocalyptic terms.
With shooting due to start on Monday – the Glorious 13th this year as the Twelfth falls on a Sunday when game-shooting is forbidden by law – the association is seizing on the media's traditionl, albeit brief, interest to step up its campaign. It says that about £100 million worth of land management's contribution to the economy is at stake if the ban is not removed or eased.
Environmental opinion is divided on the issue, with supporters of the ban arguing that Asulam treatment is the 'lazy option' to manual cutting and uprooting and less effective in the long term. But wage levels and the depopulation of the uplands has made labour-intensive management more difficult.
The Moorland Association's vice-chairman George Winn-Darley, who manages 6,500 acres of heather moorland in North Yorkshire, says:
Without the chemical, which has our own Government's approval and has been used successfully and safely for 35 years, our countryside and rural livelihoods will suffer very serious consequences.
This will not only adversely affect biodiversity, including red list endangered species, but radically impact on grouse management, jobs and ultimately the appearance of globally important moors. Three quarters of the world's heather moorland is found in the UK. Without Asulam, we would have already lost 50 per cent of it.
Grouse breeding will be badly hit, along with the shooting industry, which is worth over £67 million in England alone, creates 42,500 days of work a year and supports over 1,500 jobs. Our members spend vast sums of money managing the moorland habitat. So much is at risk, including 46 upland bird species.
The 13th has already proved unlucky for grouse shooting prospects this year, with the wettest May and June on record creating poor conditions for all moorland breeding birds. Shooting parties will be out all along the Pennines from the Cumbria and county Durham borders, through North Yorkshire, westward in the Trough of Bowland and down to the Peak District. Protesters may dog some parties although in recent years their policy has been to avoid adding to attention given to the 12th , and the shooting of wild birds such as grouse, in order to concentrate on shortcomings in the breeding of captive game, especially pheasants.
A second Guardian Northerner post on the launch in Yorkshire of a national Ban the Burn campaign to protect blanket bogs on grouse estates and other uplands is here.