Cutting alternative

Technically, burning is best because old heather regenerates (from seed mostly) quicker and fire destroys the litter which can harbour ticks.  The regrowth is more nutritious when burnt rather than cut but many estates find burning is too difficult. Heather under 370mm when cut, regenerates as fast as burned heather.

The picture shows heather cut to NSM design above the deer fence. Foreground shows tree planting for Black Grouse recovery.

Cutting, using a horizontal chainflail and a 100hp. tractor, has many practical advantages:

• Precision cutting, to achieve micro habitats, is easy. To use a cutter to imitate the patch work quilt of burning is to waste its potential for habitat improvement.
• Timeliness: Due to weather & available labour, the number of safe & effective burning days can be only 10-30 days per year. This problem is increasing due to the warmer climate encouraging faster heather growth and shorter intervals between burning. Thus it is difficult to burn the ideal acreage each year. However the number of cutting days is usually about 200 per year, allowing for about 40 lost due to snow or fog. On easy ground it is even possible to run a cutting rig at night, and rain is no problem.
• Grit – may be exposed when the flails cut into the soil.
• Layering of heather is enhanced. When mature heather is cut, some of the uncut stems which are not vertical will droop down into the cut area. This results in fresh young shoots from these stems specially if they touch the ground and form adventitious roots. The feeding area of young shoots then has up to 2 x 1 ft of vertical “hedge” sides added to each 4 – 6 foot cut.
• Relative costs need exploring because cutting is often wrongly assumed to be slower and more expensive than burning. Field comparisons show that safety (and insurance companies) may require a burning team of 4-5 people. A tractor and cutter will often be used for fire breaks along with water jet fire control equipment. So burning does not require any less machinery than cutting. The team can burn 10-40 fires per day depending on conditions. If we assume an average of 20 fires per day of 20m x 100m, the area burnt is 10 acres per day or 2 acres per man/day. A tractor heather cutter can cut 1-1.5 acres per hour or even up to 2 acres in good conditions, and this produces 8-12 acres per day i.e. as much as burning but with only one quarter or one fifth of the labour cost (machinery costs being equal), no wild fire risk and much greater operator comfort.
• Costs of distributing grit are almost nil as the grit is dispensed from the cutting tractor at points where the cuts cross.

Next section: Moor management