"Abby Allen Has No Problem With Her Neighbours Peering Over Her Luxuriant Hedges To See What She Is Up

the Guardian

‘We’ve got baby owls again’: how farming policy is helping English wildlife

Some fear the ambitious environmental land management scheme is at risk, just as farmers are beginning to embrace it

"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