Farming For Nature

Autumn 1958: I'm with my mother and "Auntie" Dora, we're blackberrying in the fields of Two Pots Farm. The hedges are thick with berries and are so neglected and outgrown that there are "tunnels" inside the hawthorn bushes where a small boy might find pheasants, rabbits, or, on one memorable occasion, a cow!

Autumn 1968: I'm walking with my father beside a freshly ploughed field not far from home. Dad bent down and picked up a clod of earth that resembled some badly mixed concrete. "They can't carry on farming like this, just putting more and more chemicals on the land every year", he sighed.

I've always thought that somewhere between these two extremes there must be a way that agriculture can move forward, working with nature rather than relentlessly destroying everything that is seen to reduce short-term profits.

Luckily there are other people with similar ideas and, unlike me, they are doing something about it. So, Autumn 2023 and my brother and I are on the Coton Countryside Reserve, just a mile or two outside of Cambridge. This compact area of farmland is in the care of the charity Cambridge: Past, Present And Future, who are putting some of this thinking into action.

Other schemes in the area include the Countryside Regeneration Trust's Lark Rise Farm and the RSPB's Hope Farm. But there's also a network of farmers who are farming along similar lines and I've also noticed many large farms are experimenting with different methods on small parcels of their land.

That rough-looking strip of land in the middle of the field has been left to encourage insects which are essential to pollinate the crops. They are usually known as beetle-banks, but they also attract large numbers of butterflies and bees. In the foreground is a wildlife-margin which has the same purpose and also provide food for seed-eating and insect-eating birds.

Flocks of Goldfinches were busy feeding on the seeds as we walked around the wide, grassy paths. Another thing you might notice in the fields these days are "cover-crops", like the sunflowers we saw earlier in the year. The long roots of sunflowers go down into the soil, breaking up the ground to a deeper level than ploughing, the seeds provide food for birds and then, when ploughed in, the dead stalks and leaves add humous to the soil. There's also a lot of interest in ways of growing crops without ploughing at all.

The path takes us up to Red Hill, a mighty summit with a viewpoint all of 45 meters (148 feet) above sea level!

It's enough to give a view across the flat lands of Cambridgeshire and the paddocks of the local riding school (which, incidentally, goes by the wonderful name of Haggis Farm - and Dumpling Farm is just down the road, honest).

There's a magnificent banquet laid out for the winter thrushes (Fieldfares and Redwings) when they return to these shores - any day now.

I'd hoped to find more fungi after the recent rains but, apart from this giant specimen, I didn't notice any.

They've also planted some local varieties of apples and plums to provide food for wildlife, though I'm sure some will be devoured by human visitors.

These human visitors, having walked most of the available paths, made their way to a pub for slightly less healthy sustenance.

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While we were at the Working Steam Weekend at Stotfold, Les took a couple of short videos which you might like to see:

(The whistles you can hear on the second video come from the steam engines that were ploughing on an adjacent field).

Take care.