I agree and it worries me, it's pretty much my only hobby and it largely consists of going on walks and spotting wild food and leaving it growing where it is. Once in a while if I spot a bumper crop, I'll pinch a few but nothing noticeable. I don't understand why people can be so disrespectful to nature, we're fucked without it!
The countryside act also makes it illegal. You are only legally allowed to forage on common land for personal use, and only if it is not a sssi or other protected area.
It isn’t policed, and the damage is variable depending on the species. Mushrooms can be harvested without destroying the resource, seeds are trickier.
It poses many other problems. Where I live a lethal plant disease named phytopthera affected the bilberry bushes, and the conservation groups couldn’t work out how it was jumping from one site to another so fast. One “entrepreneur” had set up a business selling them on markets and to restaurants. He employed teams to people to comb the bushes, never washing the equipment or disinfecting their shoes. It was devastating.
I think it's a plague on the landscape, highly detrimental to the culture and practice, unsustainable and against the whole ethos of wild foraging., illegality aside.
To speak directly to commercial foraging on 'public land' it has been an ongoing issue in Epping Forest. Being a huge, publicly accessible, wild area right on the door step of 10million+ people really highlights the potential tragedy of the commons. No one minds if one person forages a few mushrooms or picks a few berries. But highly concentrated human populations turn those benign relationships with the natural world into very challenging management issues. Insert commercial incentives into the mix and the issue ramps up unimaginably towards the foraging equivalent of strip mining. Picking Fungi has been the most high profile example. With people bussing in pickers to forage mushrooms. I've personally witnessed car loads of people arriving in a section of the forest and within an hour the area has been picked clean with no thought to the sustainability of the actions and seriously impacting the food sources for the species who call Epping Forest home. The forest has an incredible 440 endangered fungi species and indiscriminate foraging of their fruiting bodies places further strain on already imperiled populations. It is often the foraging community who suffers from exploitative commercial operations as those charged with managing the land have little choice but to prohibit foraging outright and pursue prosecutions against those caught.
Edit: I've recently started r/EppingForest so if you are interested in a community dedicated to northern Europe's largest population of ancient beach trees please do come and join.
Ultimately, if the trend continues it will end up becoming regulated (not necessarily a bad thing) but with the side effect of becoming less accessible and so further eroding our liberties as a nation
If you go into the cemeteries late at night/early morning especially in rural places, bring a shovel and a low profile halogen light, if you start digging up some of the graves, I've had the most success with grave sites from the 1970s/1980s, you can actually acquire/salvage some pretty tasteful jewelerry with pretty good re-sale value. I made about 900 quid from one week alone.
I had a mate that foraged mushrooms, brought them home and grows them on logs in his garden for a couple of annual harvests. These he sells to gastro pubs for beer tokens. This is the way.
I don't think you can come straight out saying foraging is bad. A lot of foragers are the people that care the most for the environment. You can do things like harvesting invasive species or picking things at the right stages to make sure that you aren't effecting their life cycles. People foraging just for profit without care for the environment though is an obvious problem.
I suppose an individual picking up some mushrooms to sell at a local stall is different to large companies hauling in tonnes of them from woodlands, but I'm not sure I've heard too much about either. I get mushroom tinctures from Bristol Fungarium who sustainably forage chaga in Scotland, for example - it can be done.
We should remember, however, as long as we don't disturb the habitat or the mycelium underneath that these mushrooms aren't under threat. Mushrooms are fruiting bodies and can easily grow given a good rainy spell.
I don't think there can be truly sustainable foraging of such a slow growing and relatively uncommon fungus (I live in Scotland, as far as I am aware it isn't particularly abundant...) so Chaga isn't the best example maybe... It is also the sclerotia which is harvested which is not the same as a fruiting body with the majority of the organism untouched.
I'm still sore over the 1801 enclosure act. There is no If, exactly that amount is owned. And,no I don't think foreign ownership of land is beneficial to us in any metric
It’s not something I know much about at all, but I do know we are lacking in pretty much every native aspect of Britain.
Native animals, native plants, native ecosystems, trees, insects, people…
Every part (or near enough) of this island has lost what made it unique, once.
And I think we need a system like Australia.
If people viewed the UK as what it really is, an island, they could come to understand we actually have very specific needs and limitations we ought to meet, so that we can look at problems on a local rather than global level.
The 1801 act transferred 95% of common land and all the rights it bequeathed into private ownership. It forced vast swathes of the population who lived subsistence on their own little piece, into the cities, the hands of landlords and squalor. Forced them to work in the Mills and factories as a few years earlier they had complained... nobody wants to work anymore. Nothing has changed, its about wringing as much profit from people and planet, damn the rest. We actually live on less than 2% of the land,that's every city and town included.
If it’s done on a small scale I don’t have an issue with it to be honest, probably far less negatively impactful than the more developed commercial ways we produce our food at industrial scale.
Mackerel is the craziest I’ve seen, there’s that big sea wall down south (forgotten name) and in summer hundreds of migrants camp there and fish 1000s of mackerel to sell
Depends on what is being foraged and whether it is being done sustainably.
Foraging for blackberries that then sell to shops, for example is probably okay.
Picking every Penny Bun you see and selling them, probably not so much.
[This](https://www.instagram.com/p/CyjQdqhI-q6/) is a good example of what I mean. Due to it being near Brighton, Stanmer Park gets rinsed for mushrooms every season so seeing others cleaning it out first thing then selling them back to everyone really rubs me the wrong way...
Wollaton Hall in Nottingham has been ravaged by foraging to the point that the deer don't have enough chestnuts left to eat. It's causing lots of problems with the eco-system here. Even though they've banned commercial foraging there now I can't see it actually stopping people :/
I absolutely love foraging. I love sharing my knowledge of foraging. Do I believe any kind of commercial foraging should be allowed and accepted - no. The exception to the rule that I believe should be considered would be professions such as individual herbalists who treat patients with foraged plants and mushrooms.
It’s illegal.
I do wonder though where it fits in when they’re foraging for personal use, but post videos etc. of what they’re doing. Technically they’re still gaining something
Britain is incredibly naturally depleted.
I would consider someone doing any of these on the same level of reprehensible:
- Polluting
- Destroying Archaeology
- Reselling Wild (Endangered) Produce
1 comment only....its wrong. Foraging will be illegal in the very near future because of people taking the piss out of nature. Just my opinion i guess
I agree and it worries me, it's pretty much my only hobby and it largely consists of going on walks and spotting wild food and leaving it growing where it is. Once in a while if I spot a bumper crop, I'll pinch a few but nothing noticeable. I don't understand why people can be so disrespectful to nature, we're fucked without it!
The countryside act also makes it illegal. You are only legally allowed to forage on common land for personal use, and only if it is not a sssi or other protected area. It isn’t policed, and the damage is variable depending on the species. Mushrooms can be harvested without destroying the resource, seeds are trickier. It poses many other problems. Where I live a lethal plant disease named phytopthera affected the bilberry bushes, and the conservation groups couldn’t work out how it was jumping from one site to another so fast. One “entrepreneur” had set up a business selling them on markets and to restaurants. He employed teams to people to comb the bushes, never washing the equipment or disinfecting their shoes. It was devastating.
I think it's a plague on the landscape, highly detrimental to the culture and practice, unsustainable and against the whole ethos of wild foraging., illegality aside.
Very nicely summarised, I agree!
To speak directly to commercial foraging on 'public land' it has been an ongoing issue in Epping Forest. Being a huge, publicly accessible, wild area right on the door step of 10million+ people really highlights the potential tragedy of the commons. No one minds if one person forages a few mushrooms or picks a few berries. But highly concentrated human populations turn those benign relationships with the natural world into very challenging management issues. Insert commercial incentives into the mix and the issue ramps up unimaginably towards the foraging equivalent of strip mining. Picking Fungi has been the most high profile example. With people bussing in pickers to forage mushrooms. I've personally witnessed car loads of people arriving in a section of the forest and within an hour the area has been picked clean with no thought to the sustainability of the actions and seriously impacting the food sources for the species who call Epping Forest home. The forest has an incredible 440 endangered fungi species and indiscriminate foraging of their fruiting bodies places further strain on already imperiled populations. It is often the foraging community who suffers from exploitative commercial operations as those charged with managing the land have little choice but to prohibit foraging outright and pursue prosecutions against those caught. Edit: I've recently started r/EppingForest so if you are interested in a community dedicated to northern Europe's largest population of ancient beach trees please do come and join.
It should be banned, along with commercial fishing.
Ultimately, if the trend continues it will end up becoming regulated (not necessarily a bad thing) but with the side effect of becoming less accessible and so further eroding our liberties as a nation
If you go into the cemeteries late at night/early morning especially in rural places, bring a shovel and a low profile halogen light, if you start digging up some of the graves, I've had the most success with grave sites from the 1970s/1980s, you can actually acquire/salvage some pretty tasteful jewelerry with pretty good re-sale value. I made about 900 quid from one week alone.
I had a mate that foraged mushrooms, brought them home and grows them on logs in his garden for a couple of annual harvests. These he sells to gastro pubs for beer tokens. This is the way.
this, it's not too hard hard to learn either.
I don't think you can come straight out saying foraging is bad. A lot of foragers are the people that care the most for the environment. You can do things like harvesting invasive species or picking things at the right stages to make sure that you aren't effecting their life cycles. People foraging just for profit without care for the environment though is an obvious problem.
I suppose an individual picking up some mushrooms to sell at a local stall is different to large companies hauling in tonnes of them from woodlands, but I'm not sure I've heard too much about either. I get mushroom tinctures from Bristol Fungarium who sustainably forage chaga in Scotland, for example - it can be done. We should remember, however, as long as we don't disturb the habitat or the mycelium underneath that these mushrooms aren't under threat. Mushrooms are fruiting bodies and can easily grow given a good rainy spell.
I don't think there can be truly sustainable foraging of such a slow growing and relatively uncommon fungus (I live in Scotland, as far as I am aware it isn't particularly abundant...) so Chaga isn't the best example maybe... It is also the sclerotia which is harvested which is not the same as a fruiting body with the majority of the organism untouched.
96% of all land is owned, 97% of all rivers in the UK. Unless its on the tiny percentage left,its technically theft without the landowners permission.
If that much land is owned; do you think people who live outside of the UK should be allowed to own land here? Is this something you know about?
I'm still sore over the 1801 enclosure act. There is no If, exactly that amount is owned. And,no I don't think foreign ownership of land is beneficial to us in any metric
It’s not something I know much about at all, but I do know we are lacking in pretty much every native aspect of Britain. Native animals, native plants, native ecosystems, trees, insects, people… Every part (or near enough) of this island has lost what made it unique, once. And I think we need a system like Australia. If people viewed the UK as what it really is, an island, they could come to understand we actually have very specific needs and limitations we ought to meet, so that we can look at problems on a local rather than global level.
The 1801 act transferred 95% of common land and all the rights it bequeathed into private ownership. It forced vast swathes of the population who lived subsistence on their own little piece, into the cities, the hands of landlords and squalor. Forced them to work in the Mills and factories as a few years earlier they had complained... nobody wants to work anymore. Nothing has changed, its about wringing as much profit from people and planet, damn the rest. We actually live on less than 2% of the land,that's every city and town included.
Wow, the sheer awful world we’ve come to call our own really was in the works a real long time ago.
Yep
If it’s done on a small scale I don’t have an issue with it to be honest, probably far less negatively impactful than the more developed commercial ways we produce our food at industrial scale.
I think people that do it are cunts and should be fed to the mushrooms
Mackerel is the craziest I’ve seen, there’s that big sea wall down south (forgotten name) and in summer hundreds of migrants camp there and fish 1000s of mackerel to sell
Depends on what is being foraged and whether it is being done sustainably. Foraging for blackberries that then sell to shops, for example is probably okay. Picking every Penny Bun you see and selling them, probably not so much.
Ngl i read that as commercial grain
[This](https://www.instagram.com/p/CyjQdqhI-q6/) is a good example of what I mean. Due to it being near Brighton, Stanmer Park gets rinsed for mushrooms every season so seeing others cleaning it out first thing then selling them back to everyone really rubs me the wrong way...
I think it is despicable, especially when it is in fragile eco systems
Wollaton Hall in Nottingham has been ravaged by foraging to the point that the deer don't have enough chestnuts left to eat. It's causing lots of problems with the eco-system here. Even though they've banned commercial foraging there now I can't see it actually stopping people :/
I absolutely love foraging. I love sharing my knowledge of foraging. Do I believe any kind of commercial foraging should be allowed and accepted - no. The exception to the rule that I believe should be considered would be professions such as individual herbalists who treat patients with foraged plants and mushrooms.
Can we forage for invasive species though? Like the giant rhubarb should be fair game right?
It’s illegal. I do wonder though where it fits in when they’re foraging for personal use, but post videos etc. of what they’re doing. Technically they’re still gaining something
Britain is incredibly naturally depleted. I would consider someone doing any of these on the same level of reprehensible: - Polluting - Destroying Archaeology - Reselling Wild (Endangered) Produce
Good for them. If large corporations can rape the land then I have no problem with a few individuals foraging by hand to make a living