Conservation Grazing RSS

Climate Change, Conservation Grazing, Coppicing, Countryside Stewardship, Floodplain Meadows, Hedge Laying, Hedgerows, Natural Regeneration, Sustainable Farming Incentive, Tree Planting, Wildflowers, Yorkshire Ings - May 17, 2024

Tips & Trees

Tips and Trees It’s been a difficult winter at Rosewood, not least because the summer was so wet, then the rain came early and relentlessly over the winter months, as they did in many parts of the country this year. One thing that wet weather does is to focus one’s mind on the future and how to cope with the challenges we face. As I wrote back in 2019, the climate is changing and if the intervening five years have shown us anything it’s that the pace of change is accelerating rapidly with warmer, wetter winters coming as a direct...

Sustainable Farming - where is the incentive?

In 2005 English Nature (the former name of Natural England) published the paper The importance of livestock grazing for wildlife conservation, which detailed the concerns over the changes to farm support at the time which took away production subsidies and replaced them with simplified land area payments. This move meant that farmers no longer needed to produce anything from the land to receive the payment, which was made available simply to own agricultural land. It was anticipated that this would result in reduced grazing of biodiverse grasslands and the subsequent gradual decline of grassland biodiversity.