A great way to beef up a shoot

The sustainable future of our sport depends on rebuilding the old connections between farming and fieldsports, says Patrick Laurie

- Patrick Laurie

Look back through old copies of Shooting Times and you’ll find a great deal of farming material woven into the blend. There are many stories of hares and rabbits shot from a combine harvester or terriers catching rats in the stackyard; scruffy adventures that always harked back to an agricultural calendar.

The connection between farming and field sports is still present today, but it’s become harder to see as the two worlds have slowly drifted apart. Farming has intensified over the past 50 years, and many of the changes have driven a decline of wild game. We now associate several quarry species with tales of scarcity and decline, so it’s hard to believe that birds such as grey partridges were ever produced almost by accident. However, a shootable surplus came as a by-product of traditional farm management, and that seems crazy when you think how much work goes into conserving wild gamebirds today.

Different path

As traditional farmland quarry species declined, shooting was forced to follow a different path by releasing the game instead. This means that farming practices are now much less relevant to the success or failure of a day’s shooting. It’s noticeable that as farming and field sports parted company, some gamekeepers were forced to become mini farmers, retaining some strands of friendly arable management in the form of game crops.

For shooting folk of my father’s generation, it was hard to imagine field sports without farming. Partridge shooting was just another harvest in a steadily revolving rural year alongside hoeing turnips and cutting oats.