#uk farm

[maureen2musings]

Llangollen, Wales

daniel_casson

[thegimmicky]

Misty sheepyard

[reasonsforhope]

"Abby Allen has no problem with her neighbours peering over her luxuriant hedges to see what she is up to on her farm.

For years she has been carrying out ad hoc experiments with wildlife and farming techniques; in her lush Devon fields native cattle graze alongside 400-year-old hedgerows, with birds and butterflies enjoying the species-rich pasture.

Under the environmental land management scheme (ELMS), introduced by the government in 2021, those experiments were finally being funded. “We have a neighbour who has always been more of an intensive farmer,” she says, but he is now considering leaving fields unploughed to help the soil. “It genuinely is having such a huge impact in changing people’s mindsets who traditionally would never have thought about farming in this way.”

The new nature payments scheme followed the UK’s exit from the EU, when the government decided to scrap the common agricultural payments scheme, which gave a flat subsidy dependent on the number of acres a farmer managed. In its place came ELMS, which pays farmers for things such as planting hedges, sowing wildflowers for birds to feed on and leaving corners of their land wild for nature.

But these schemes are now at threat of defunding, as the Labour government has refused to commit to the £2.4bn a year spending pot put in place by the previous Conservative government. With spending tight and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, cutting back on infrastructure and hinting at tax rises, a cut to the ELMS scheme may be on her list.

However, government data released last week found the schemes were working to tentatively bring nature back to England’s farmland. Butterflies, bees and bats are among the wildlife being boosted by ELMS, with birds among the chief beneficiaries, particularly ones that largely feed on invertebrates. An average of 25% more breeding birds were found in areas utilising the eco-friendly schemes.

...there are also farmers who welcome the schemes. Allen says the ELMS has helped her farm provide data and funds to expand and improve the good things they were doing for nature. “Some of the money available around things like soil testing and monitoring – instead of us going ‘we think these are the right things to do and providing these benefits,’ we can now measure it. The exciting thing now is there is money available to measure and monitor and kind of prove that you’re doing the right things. And so then you can find appropriate funding to do more of that.”

Allen, who is in the Nature Friendly Farming Network, manages a network of farms in England, most of which are using the ELMS. This includes chicken farms where the poultry spend their life outside rather than in sheds and other regenerative livestock businesses...

Mark Spencer was an environment minister until 2024 when he lost his seat, but now spends more time in the fields admiring the fruits of his and his family’s labour. He says that a few years of nature-friendly agriculture has restored lapwings and owls.

“On the farm, I haven’t seen lapwings in any number for what feels like a whole generation. You know, as a kid, when I was in my early teens, you’d see lapwings. We used to call them peewits. We’d see them all the time, and they sort of disappeared.

“But then, me and my neighbours changed the way we did cropping, left space in the fields for them to nest, and suddenly they returned. You need to have a piece of land where you’re not having mechanical machinery go over it on a regular basis, because otherwise you destroy the nest. We’ve also got baby owls in our owl box now for the first time in 15 years. They look mega, to be honest, these little owls, little balls of fluff. It is rewarding.”"

-via The Guardian, August 23, 2024

[ardley]

Cumbrian Decay

Photographed by Freddie Ardley - instagram

[vox-anglosphere]

As with doctors, British farmers make their daily rounds too.

[dubmill]

Cockfosters, London; 1.5.2021

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Under the most ambitious climate change mitigation scenario, food production is expected to decline by up to 25%,” the report reads. “Ambitious combinations of measures, including reducing food waste, using arable land to grow crops for direct human consumption rather than livestock feed (and thus implying a dietary change), and increased productivity on remaining farmland, could fully mitigate expected reductions in food production.” After the UK left the EU, farmers were no longer part of the Common Agricultural Policy subsidies scheme, which paid land managers according to the acreage they farmed. Instead the devolved nations have set up their own farming payments system. In England, this is the sometimes controversial Environment Land Management Scheme (ELMS), which pays farmers to make room for nature by letting hedges grow wilder, or sowing wildflowers for birds and bees on field margins. Anecdotally, farmers taking part in the schemes have noticed more wildlife, but until now no data has been available. The new government studies found that more mobile creatures, such as butterflies, moths and hoverflies, fared better when larger areas of land – a large farm or multiple small neighbouring ones – were involved in the scheme. Surveyed squares with high levels of eco-friendly schemes in the surrounding landscape had on average 117 more butterflies (a 53% increase), compared with the average for squares with low scores for schemes in the surrounding landscape. There were an average of 12 more moth species in areas with more eco-friendly schemes. Smaller, less mobile insects were boosted in smaller, more local areas signed up to the schemes. Numbers of barbastelle and Daubenton’s bats were also found to respond positively to eco-friendly schemes at the landscape level. Martin Lines, CEO of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, told the Guardian: “The evidence in the Natural England report confirms what many nature-friendly farmers are finding: delivering good-quality habitats, supported by public money, is helping to stop nature’s decline or even reverse it. Many farmers are pleased that their hard work is showing positive results, and with the support of well-funded ELMS, more farmers can deliver or help reverse nature’s decline.”

9 August 2024

[huariqueje]

Saughy Rigg - Michel Buylen.

Belgian, b. 1953 -

Oil on panel , 30 x 24 cm.

[maureen2musings]

Country lanes & meadows

Daniel Casson

[reasonsforhope]

"When Francois Beyers first pitched the concept of 3D ocean farming to the Welsh regulators, he had to sketch it on napkins. 

Today the seafood farm is much more than a drawing, but if you walked along the Welsh coastal path near St David’s, all you’d see is a line of buoys. As Beyers puts it: “It’s what’s below that’s important.”

Thick tussles of lustrous seaweed suspend from the buoys, mussels cling to its furry connective ropes and dangling Chinese lantern-esque nets are filled with oysters and scallops. 

“It’s like an underwater garden,” says Beyers, co-founder of the community-owned regenerative ocean farm, Câr-y-Môr. The 3-hectare site is part of a fledgling sector, one of 12 farms in the UK, which key players believe could boost ocean biodiversity, produce sustainable agricultural fertiliser and provide year-round employment in areas that have traditionally been dependent on tourism. 

Created in 2020 by Beyers and six family members, including his father-in-law – an ex-shellfish farmer – the motivation is apparent in the name, which is Welsh for “for the love of the sea”. ...

Pictured: Drone shot of Câr-y-Môr, which is on the site of abandoned mussel farms. Image: Scott Chalmers

Ocean farming comes from the technical term ‘integrated multi-trophic aquaculture’, which means a mixture of different seaweed and shellfish species growing together to mutually benefit each other. But it’s not just a way of growing food with little human input, it also creates ocean habitat. 

“You’re creating a breeding ground for marine animals,” explains Beyers who adds that the site has seen more gannets diving, porpoises and seals – to name a few – since before the farm was established.

Ocean farms like Câr-y-Môr, notes Ross Brown – environmental research fellow at the University of Exeter – have substantial conservation benefits.

“Setting up a seaweed farm creates an exclusion zone so fishermen can’t trawl it,” explains Brown, who has been conducting experiments on the impacts of seaweed and shellfish farms across the UK. 

Brown believes a thriving ocean farming industry could provide solutions to the UK’s fish stock, which is in “a deeply troubling state” according to a report that found half of the key populations to be overfished. “It would create stepping stones where we have safe havens for fish and other organisms,” he adds. 

But UK regulators have adopted a cautious approach, note Brown and Beyers, making it difficult for businesses like Câr-y-Môr to obtain licenses. “It’s been a tough old slog,” says Beyers, whose aim is to change the legislation to make it easier for others to start ocean farms. 

Despite navigating uncharted territories, the business now has 14 full-time employees, and 300 community members, of which nearly 100 have invested in the community-benefit society. For member and funding manager Tracey Gilbert-Falconer, the model brings expertise but most importantly, buy-in from the tight-knit local community. 

“You need to work with the community than forcing yourself in,” she observes. 

And Câr-y-Môr is poised to double its workforce in 2024 thanks to a Defra grant of £1.1 million to promote and develop the Welsh seafood industry as part of the UK Seafood Fund Infrastructure Scheme. This will go towards building a processing hub, set to be operational in April, to produce agricultural fertiliser from seaweed. 

Full of mineral nutrients and phosphorous from the ocean, seaweed use in farming is nothing new, as Gilbert-Falconer notes: “Farmers in Pembrokeshire talk about their grandad going down to the sea and throwing [seaweed] on their farms.” 

But as the war in Ukraine has caused the price of chemical fertiliser to soar, and the sector tries to reduce its environmental impact – of which synthetic fertiliser contributes 5% of total UK emissions – farmers and government are increasingly looking to seaweed. 

The new hub will have capacity to make 65,000 litres of sustainable fertiliser annually with the potential to cover 13,000 acres of farmland. 

But to feed the processing hub, generate profit and reduce their dependency on grants, the co-op needs to increase the ocean farm size from three to 13 hectares. If they obtain licences, Beyers says they should break even in 18 months. 

For now, Beyers reflects on a “humbling” three years but revels in the potential uses of seaweed, from construction material to clothing.  

“I haven’t seen the limit yet,” he smiles."

-via Positive.News, February 19, 2024

[cocacolacoast]

growing up in the english countryside <3

[thegimmicky]

Process of building the Misty Sheepyard

[vox-anglosphere]

Few mediaeval barns are left in Britain, but Leigh Court endures..

[nicdoesntexist]

[probablyasocialecologist]

This is The Farming Left: these land workers share a politics, united by the concept of food sovereignty: the right to control of local food systems, which originated with farmers in the Global South. ‘We’re talking about equitable access to resources to enable localised food supplies’, explains Fernandes. These organisations are tackling the challenges of access to land in an unequal landscape: the Ecological Land Cooperative, for example, purchases large plots and obtains planning permission for dwellings before parcelling them up into affordable smallholdings.  The Kindling Trust in Manchester is also seeking to foster a new generation of agroecological farmers. The Trust, which was established in 2007, has a veg box scheme and a community garden, and also offers training to new entrants, but there has always been a long-term plan to establish a cooperative farm. Since raising over a million pounds from more than six hundred investors last year, the Trust is looking to purchase a 120-acre farm in the Manchester area. ‘We want people to feel ownership in whatever way they get involved’, explains co-founder Chris Walsh. Whether they are founding members, workers, investors, or tenants, they will all be represented equally on a governing board.   There ‘is a need for a rural radicalism’ of this kind, argues Chris Smaje, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future (2020). ‘It’s about trying to de-commodify land and take it out of speculative ownership’, he explains. For Smaje, who plans to purchase a 20-acre plot to be divided up among several small-scale farmers, the goal is ‘to build a land-based community’ and ultimately ‘generate more of what we need within our own communities’.  While the radical agrarian community in the UK pales in comparison to the strength of conservative farming interests, this fight for land – and the right to use it – is happening on a global scale. The international peasants’ movement is connected through the 200-million strong La Vía Campesina, linking groups such as Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or ‘Landless Workers’ Movement’, which has, since the 1980s, been occupying land to their counterparts across the world. The world’s farming Left is a David to big agribusiness’s Goliath, the latter having been bolstered by states, major international institutions, and the liberalising of global political economy since the Second World War. From Zapatistas to Scottish crofters, the peasants’ movement is fighting to turn the tide on our social and ecological future before it is too late.

[maureen2musings]

Newlands Valley, Lake District

englishcountrysides