Farmers until recently made a reasonable living from 15 hectares and 20 cows, providing employment for one or two farm workers. Today a farmer needs at least 150 hectares to make the same living, and cannot afford any workers.
One of the casualties of this so-called increased efficiency is that the farmer does not have time to look after his hedges properly. His income is based on the assumption that his fields are like those in East Anglia, maybe ten times bigger, and that his field boundaries are wire fences or thorn hedgerows without any hedgebank. Many of the commercial farmers in Cornwall are incomers and have no idea of how Cornish hedges should be looked after.
Barn-conversions often have a field or two attached to them, used for horses or as a smallholding. These amateur landowners lack knowledge of how to repair and maintain Cornish hedges. Both the commercial and the amateur farmers will employ a hedge trimmer to cut the hedge growth, as this is a relatively small cost. Repairing gaps is a different matter. Lacking the skill themselves and having to get in a contractor, it comes as an unwelcome surprise that even repairing small gaps may cost £30 a time, and they have not allowed for this expenditure.