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| Becky Hulme |
Gillian Morgan |
Severe Damage Jan 04. |
Summer 04 After Grazing Ends |
Biodiversity Enhancement Scheme - the potential of network sites created over a larger area
| ABSTRACT |
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In 10 years Denmark Farm transformed itself from what the RSPB judged to be a “very barren place…very low in wildlife interest” into what the CCW have described as “a notable nature reserve”…a working blueprint in the successful restoration of biodiversity to the farmed countryside.” The Shared Earth Trust’s biodiversity enhancement scheme is now in full flow. The trust is currently working with a network of farmers and landowners to restore over 11km of boundary habitat as part of the Ceredigion Biodiversity Enhancement Scheme or CBES. The majority of this work involves fencing off field margins to protect hedgerows from grazing animals.Becky Hulme, assistant project officer said;“In our experience there are many landowners keen to adopt conservation measures on substantial parts of their land but they are often isolated and lack the confidence to embark on this process. The Trust wanted to work more closely with these people to help develop a biodiversity “mosaic” across the countryside, threading its way between and across more intensively managed land and linking up richer conservation areas.”The idea of a landowner network is at the root of the CBES. The scheme aims to bring together landowners who are interested in helping wildlife return to their land. The project received funding from Objective 1 as well as the Countryside Council for Wales and Environment Wales.Becky Hulme;“Simple measures like fencing off hedgerows can be effective for conservation and involve little cost. Leaving a 2-5 metre strip either side of the hedge enables and edge of grasses and other flowering plants to establish; this gradual transition from field to hedge can benefit a range of wildlife.”If you are a landowner and are interested in finding out more about the CBES, contact the Shared Earth Trust on (01570 493 358) or email set@denmark-famr.freeserve.co.uk or visit www.shared-earth-trust.org.uk. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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DATE: 22/11/2004 FULL INTERVIEW
So what is the Ceredigion Biodiversity Enhancement Scheme? Well basically, it’s a scheme for local landowners within Ceredigion. The idea is it’s a habitat restoration scheme. It’s based on the experience of Denmark Farm. We send packs out to landowners, which are about the Trust. I’ll start off telling you about the Trust to start off with. It was bought by a couple of smallholders in the late eighties, they came from Southern Britain and they had this idealistic idea about what a smallholding should be like in Wales, and they came here and they had what they called their silent spring, because it had been very intensively farmed, there wasn’t much wildlife, so they started up the Shared Earth Trust to restore the land, they monitored it all the way through, about the management of the land. We do training courses as well, we have an education role. Anyway the idea of this scheme was to teach people what we knew, because there are a lot of holdings that haven’t got much wildlife value. A lot of conservationists and countryside managers thought that they were a bit mad really because there wasn’t really anything here that was worth conserving because of intensive farming, a succession of short-term landowners. Right, so is this a working farm as well then? It’s working in that 2 thirds of the land is grazed, with various cattle, but they’re not ours really, they are organic grazure, so it’s not economically viable, it’s a demonstration site of how farms can be restored. As project officer how does your background fit in with this job? Well I’ve got a degree in Environmental Management from Lampeter University, the idea in setting up the scheme was that there’s lots of land that needs restoring, we’ve shown how much scope there is, how easy and low cost as well. The idea is not to be an oasis, like a nature reserve, so we’re not an isolated habitat, and to then spread what we’ve learnt, about the environment and wildlife. Are you involved in endangered species? No we’re generalist, that’s the thing, the idea is not to prioritise, The Trust was set up with the aims of not discriminating, dealing with normal wildlife like robins, some rarities, I mean we have orchids, which are a rarity, but we try not to discriminate, to create a variety of different habitats that are all interlinked to give the best opportunities for the maximum amount of wildlife, a lot of wildlife that we think of as common has declined loads, we can’t concentrate on specialist species that are very rare, because sometimes you miss out on the general, there are species that used to be very rare and now have become uncommon, such as the hare, they are in decline because they need rough grassland, they need cover, if you look at the intensive fields with just rye grass there, there’s no cover at all, they like cover and they like lining up in grass land, with lots of tussocks, they find it difficult to adapt. The idea with this scheme is it will cover those missed out by other schemes. Have you heard of Tir Gofal, they are run by the CCW? It’s an agri-environmental scheme, it’s the main one in Wales. Our idea was to target landowners who didn’t fit into their scheme. Most of the recipients are smallholders. So tell me something about the scheme or schemes you run? The process is they join up and pay a subscription fee, and then they attend a conservation planning day, which explain the basics of making you own conservation, the idea is to empower the landowners, so that they get the idea of what we are talking about. If it’s a farmer that’s got to have an economic return, its hard to turn that around, but we can show them how to work on the positive aspects of their site to improve as much as possible, within whatever boundaries. So they come on a conservation planning day and then, following that, we can give them a site visit, which a lot of landowners are really enthusiastic about having a specialist look round, and give them advice and things. If there is any work to be done, they can get a grant of up to 48% on ecological grounds. They come to us with a conservation plan, say what they want doing where. And this is Objective 1 funding? Yes. And what sort of work do you do? We’ve done a lot of fencing, but it’s not just fencing – in doing that you are creating wildlife corridors, basically a lot of hedges aren’t fenced out at all because of livestock, the hedge gets degraded because of livestock, too many sheep, cows, we pay to fence out a corridor, near to the hedge, 2 metres from the centre of the hedge, a lot of the time the farmers have just been fencing nearer the hedges so its’ not been as beneficial to the wildlife, paying to fence them out is a cheap option of hedge restoration. We do pay for laying hedges as well. We’ve done hedge planting, hedge fixes. What is hedge laying exactly? Hedge laying is when the hedge is already there and you’ve got the bits of hedge plants or trees and you cut them and lay them. The idea originally was to create a stock proof barrier, but another indirect advantage of this traditional method is that you create a lot of cover for birds, small mammals, They have always used those conduits of the countryside to get from place to place. As well as shelter the hedge provides food. Hedge laying is what is supposed to happen to a hedge. It used to happen years and years ago, but fences became more popular, or farmers have not bothered to preserve the hedges. Say if a hedge has grown out or been overeaten or something, and has just become a line of trees, mature trees, that would be very difficult to lay. Sometimes the only option is to either coppice, cutting them off at the bottom, to create dense vegetation. A lot of my job is finding information for landowners, about specialised aspects; they might have badgers on their land. How to improve their habitat, the law on fencing, that sort of thing. I have to find information for them really. A trouble-shooter. In a way yes, I don’t always know the answer; sometimes I have to refer to a different agency, on an ecological question or something like that. We also do pond restoration and pond creation. We haven’t done as many ponds as we thought we would. Basically you can’t put a pond, any old pond, it’s got to have the right surrounding habitat, so for example a habitat which is already valuable – unspoilt - you would be losing that habitat by plonking a pond there. Also you would have to make sure that it holds water for the majority of the year so, we ask people to dig trial pits, then monitor them to see if they hold water first. So we haven’t achieved as many as we thought we would. We have done a bit of tree planting, but part of our job is to point people in the direction of other schemes, like the woodland grant scheme, and they are specialist wood people you know, but occasionally, they don’t have enough land to qualify for the scheme only being smallholders, so then we will do it on our scheme – but only in that case. So when did Objective 1 start with Shared Earth Trust? Well I started a year ago last September, the scheme started at the beginning of 2003, I wasn’t the first assistant project officer, the project only goes to as far as the end of 2005. There is funding for running the project and funding for capital work. There are 51 sites currently registered, we did hope to get more landowners but on the other hand we’ve done more work than we thought we would, to date we’ve done nearly 7km of linear habitat. By linear habitat we mean something to do with the hedge habitat or ditch. Like I say it could be fencing it off, it could be hedge laying, coppicing that area. Gillian has done a lot of work on this scheme, it would help if you visited her, she’s very eager. Sometimes the work ends up costing more than the estimate. She’s done loads of work, hedge laying, and pond restoration. A lot of people on these schemes are very keen on wildlife and conservation but they don’t always know about how you go about it. You know, we’re not saying that everywhere should be all rushes, but a rush pasture is really valuable for wildlife, and it’s a habitat that’s disappearing, because of non-drainage. Things like Snipe (birds) have reduced quite dramatically, they used to be all around here, they do feed here now, but they’re not breeding here. We’ve got otters here as well, again not breeding but using the site. A lot of landowners are keen to get going but they just need that bit of guidance, and a lot of time they’ve got it right, they’ve got the idea right, but they haven’t got the confidence, to actually put money in, Is there anything else you would like to add? One good thing about this scheme is that it’s bought work people together, contractors, good for getting skills together and creating jobs as well as obvious benefits to the environment .------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gillian Morgan “We were the first farm to actually get grant approval for the first stage of the work we done. We are now coming up to the end of the second year. The scheme ran for 3 years and will finish at the end of 2005. We have done various things, we have done some double fencing, for hedges. we have laid an old hedge, an old blackthorn hedge, and then having laid the hedge, we have double fenced it which will now protect it from livestock. We were a beef and sheep farm, well I suppose to some extent we still are although we don’t actually own these sheep but we have them here for 6 months over the winter, and they have a habit of eating any growth that pops up, they will eat is as far as hedging is concerned, they keep them trimmed all the time, to an excessive extent, so by double fencing them you protect the hedge from grazing livestock, and then the hedge can thicken up, regenerate itself, so that’s one of the major things we have done, and I can show you some of the photographs of that. One of the other things we have done is to single fence where we’ve got a boundary, with a stone and earth hedge bank, they were the field boundaries for all our fields at one point, about that high with a mixture of stone and soil, so what happens there is sheep jumping up on them, or cattle seem to love rubbing their heads on them, so the whole thing collapses, erodes, and we have fenced 2 quite long stretches of that so that the plants growing on those banks, first of all it protects the walls which are a valuable habitat in themselves, and also the plants have an opportunity to re-establish themselves, the other set of photos we’ve got are where we have done that, what the wall looked like before we did it and what the wall looked like this summer with all the flowers growing on it. We have also fenced along the riverside corridor, one of our boundaries is a river, and we have fenced a long corridor alongside of the river. That hasn’t got anything much to see yet, but we hope that will self-seed trees, because it’s adjacent to it, alongside the river are alders and ash and blackthorn and hawthorn trees so we’re hoping that they will establish themselves, in that corridor in due course. In all cases, these corridors are probably 3 metres wide so it’s a fairly substantial chunk of land, we’ll be able to grow things left undisturbed. We also had a contribution towards the digging of the pond, but in fact it was a very large pond, the contribution that the CBES were able to give was a very small contribution but we have also at our own expense and I like to feel that really we put the money into digging in the scrape which is a very shallow pond with wavy edges, so you’ve got a lot of shallow water round the edge, we did that at the same time so we had a contribution from the CBES towards digging the pond, we have just now finished double fencing another hedge line, which again was old trees and gorse, so there again it will regenerate over time, but it will obviously take a few years to do it, and you know about the grants that they give do you? 48% of standard costs, and a standard cost is a figure per metre, what is considered to be an average cost, doing that particular job so, hedging one amount, fencing another amount, they will pay 48% of the standard costs, so if you do a job and it actually works out more than the standard cost per metre then the landowner has to pay the 52% plus and the rest, which is a very substantial contribution towards the work, and I think certainly what we have found is that we have done work which we wouldn’t almost certainly considered doing otherwise, so as far as we’ve concerned encouraged us to look at the potential, enhancing biodiversity, on this farm. So do you think you would have done it without the grant? I think we wouldn’t have done so much, definitely not no. It also has to be done within time limits.Were you environmental before this project though?Well we are an organic farm, and we have been organic now since 2000. The other thing is we are running it as a commercial farm, what we have done is looked for areas where we can give up land, but use the rest under the organic standards, to its commercial potential. We are a combination of a livestock farm plus doing what we can in the hedgerows and other areas, I think there has been a good response I think there is a growing awareness that a lot can be done, over your whole farm and I think it’s unrealistic to expect people who are trying to farm commercially. It all depends what land you own and what your own ideas and objectives are. I think where this scheme is so good is that they are aiming to form a sort of network, or areas that are good for biodiversity, but not necessarily aiming for 100%, so in that way you can, probably get a lot more favourable response, perhaps if it was a question of all or nothing you might not be able to do anything at all, so I think it’s a very worthwhile scheme. I think that in terms of spending money on anything most people would think it’s a worthwhile objective, you’re not talking about huge sums of money, they are being put to use by a lot of people in a fairly small way, but it all adds up to a significant whole. ENDS. |