Environment

The environment is very important to us here at Grendon House Farm. We first began our own 'in house' environment plan long before the government thought about protecting our countryside in the early 1980’s. We started by not cropping land next to rivers, streams and ponds to ensure no chemicals or fertilisers leaked into the waster courses on the farm. We still practice this today but its been called the official name of ‘LERAP’ by the government, so lots of farms now practice this policy.

We feel that some land that is unproductive should be allowed to grow freely. We cannot see any point in ‘pushing’ the land to grow a crop, applying chemicals and fertilisers when it simply is not capable of doing so. Would you become a chef if you could not cook for instance? Therefore we have areas in field corners and along hedgerows we no longer put crops on. These are all covered in whats called ‘wild bird mixes’. These are varying plants and weeds allowed to grow to provide nesting habitats for all types of wildlife.

All our hedgerows are protected from the crop by at least a 2m margin which is part of something called Cross Compliance rulings. These are a set of rules all farmers have to stick to in order to produce crops. However a large proportion of our hedgerows are actually protected by 10 – 24 metre margins where we plant ‘wild bird mixes’ to stimulate wildlife activity. On top of this we only cut our hedges every 3 years to allow birds nests to develop. Even then when we cut them its more or a tidying job rather than cutting them down to nothing, which used to be standard practice.

Environmental Schemes: On top of what we already do, we are also members of a scheme called Entry Level Stewardship (ELS). This is a scheme designed to protect the environment. Many of the things we were already doing here were options within ELS, so the transition for us was very straight forward. We are also looking into joining another scheme called the Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) as this takes things a step further introducing things like wetlands and woodlands.

Finally we come to ‘Set a Side’ which is many farmers bugbear. Basically most farmers were paid money by the government to leave 8% of the land un-cropped every year. There are many reasons for this but to many to go into here. However the core idea was to reduce the Food Mountains appearing in the late 80’s. By taking a proportion of the land out of production less food would be produced and to be honest it seems to have worked so well that we are now nearly into a food deficit situation. As of September 2007 'Set a side' was abolished by the Government/EU to 0% for at least one year but possibly two. The thinking behind this is to even up the supply/demand curve for food. Whether it will work or not is another matter so we will wait and see! 

What does this mean to us and what have we done?

Well basically not a great deal because as already mentioned we are already in the ELS scheme which is not affect by the new 0% ruling. The 'Set a side' we have is made up of a few grass fields and some less then productive areas which have wild bird cover sown on them. What we have done is taken some of the wild bird covers but left all the grass areas and unproductive areas. This has brought about 4.5% of the 8% back into cropping leaving 3.5% still uncropped and down to wild bird mixtures.