"Fire Is a Good Servant, But a Bad Enemy", as Radio 4 speaks to those actually on the ground fighting fires.

On Tuesday, a farmer in Rutland stopped his tractor in the middle of harvest to take a call from BBC Radio 4. In under four minutes, speaking to Winifred Robinson on You and Yours, he set out a clearer account of wildfire prevention than anything government has managed to publish this summer.

Monty Andrews has been farming for more than sixty years. He was not representing a campaign group. He had no press line to deliver and no funding to protect. He simply described what he has learned about fire from six decades of working the land, and in doing so he made the case for active land management more effectively than any of us could.

Prevention is a habit, not a policy document

Asked what his farm was doing about the risk, Mr Andrews did not talk about strategies or consultations. He talked about straw.

This year, he said, they have been clearing the straw straight behind the combine, so there is nothing left lying about. A stubble field, he pointed out, is far easier to handle than rows of straw. He keeps a vehicle standing by so that a break can be dragged across a field the moment it is needed.

This is not theory. On 19 July, a farmer near Tadley in Hampshire used his combine harvester to cut a firebreak in a burning field, stopping the blaze before it reached standing crop. Essex Fire and Rescue Service has publicly thanked farmers for doing the same, and now advises landowners directly on working with crews to create fuel breaks using ploughs and machinery.

Across the country, the people arriving first at a rural fire are very often the ones who own the machinery, know the ground and have prepared for it. As Mr Andrews put it, they see what is going on. It is not a new thing.

What the moors used to teach us

The most striking section of the interview came when he turned to moorland. Years ago, he explained, he held moors for grouse shooting, and the keepers carried out muirburn: burning off sections of moor in rotation to bring on new shoots for the grouse.

Two details in his account deserve attention.

The first is that the ground was walked before it was burned, to make certain there were no ground-nesting birds. The safeguarding was not an afterthought bolted on by regulation. It was simply how the job was done.

The second is his benchmark. Even through the heatwave of 1976, he said, they never had any problems, because the burning was controlled and the fuel was therefore never allowed to build.

That reference is worth pausing on. This summer, 2026 became the first year on record to see six separate days above 35C, breaking a record previously shared with 1976 and 2020. Mr Andrews is not comparing today's conditions with some gentler past. He is describing management that held up under the closest thing this country had to the heat we are now living through.

The fuel load is the whole argument

He was blunt about what has replaced it. On the news, he said, you now see heather bushes grown as large as gooseberry bushes, full of dead grass. That was never allowed, because heather at that size is of no use. It is only valuable to the birds when it is low and carrying green tips.

This is the point that consistently goes missing from the national conversation. Rank, leggy, decadent heather packed with dead material is not a conservation success. It is poor habitat and it is standing fuel. Removing that fuel in cool, controlled, carefully timed conditions is the single most reliable way of ensuring it does not burn later in uncontrolled ones.

The figures bear out what happens when it accumulates. By 16 July this year, more than 18,600 hectares had burned across the United Kingdom, with 65 individual fires larger than 30 hectares recorded. Cairngorms National Park was evacuated. A major incident was declared in North Wales. A festival site in Dorset lost tents to a heathland fire. Natural England assessed large parts of southern England and the south Midlands as being at exceptional risk.

"Too many people wearing bomber jackets and binoculars"

Asked why we no longer do this, and whether the reason was simply the cost of manual labour, Mr Andrews gave an answer that will make some listeners bristle. The problem, he said, is that there are too many people wearing bomber jackets and binoculars.

Winifred Robinson put it to him directly. Did he mean birdwatchers, a fear of harming wildlife? He agreed that he did, and then qualified it in terms that deserve at least as much attention as the jibe. He had, he said, all the sentiments in the world for wildlife, and they look after wildlife. He was speaking from beside the River Welland, and remarked that you could not sit in a more beautiful place.

That qualification is the substance of it. His complaint was not with people who care about birds. It was with a conservation culture he believes has stopped weighing trade-offs, one that treats every intervention as a risk to be managed while never asking what the cost of doing nothing amounts to. There are degrees, he said, of what conservation needs to do, and it works both ways.

He put the frustration more sharply still. There are, in his words, too many people who know everything about nothing and nothing about anything.

It is a blunt line, and it will not be welcomed in every quarter. But it names something that anyone working the uplands will recognise immediately: the widening gap between those who set the rules for a landscape and those who spend their lives in it. Mr Andrews had stopped a tractor mid-harvest to make the point. That, in itself, tells you how strongly it is felt.

Listen to the people holding the machinery

The National Farmers' Union has called for a national wildfire strategy drawing together fire and rescue services, local authorities, Natural England, the Forestry Commission and National Highways. That is welcome, and overdue. But a strategy is only as good as the practical tools it leaves available to the people on the ground.

For years, those who manage moorland have been told that controlled burning is a contested, marginal, faintly disreputable practice. Then a farmer in Rutland stops his tractor, is asked an open question by Radio 4, and reaches for it unprompted as the obvious answer.

He offered a phrase for it that is hard to improve on. Fire, he said, is a good servant but a bad enemy. It depends entirely on how it is monitored and how it is used.

That is the argument. It has always been the argument. The question is how many more summers like this one it takes before it is heard.

Listen here at 52mins for the full interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002zgh1