Demonstration site
Testing agri-environment measures in a typical English farmed landscape
The Water Friendly Farming demonstration site is a working agricultural landscape in Leicestershire, England. It is situated east of the city of Leicester, near the village of Loddington and about halfway between the towns of Market Harborough and Melton Mowbury.
There is nothing extraordinary about the Water Friendly Farming demonstration site – and that’s precisely the point. It was chosen for Water Friendly Farming precisely because it is typical of English lowland farmed landscapes.
The three catchments
The demonstration site includes three adjacent catchments: two experimental catchments and one control catchment, each around 10 km2 in area. The catchments are the Barky Brook, the Eye Brook and the Stonton Brook.
In terms of the water environment, the catchments are typical of the ordinary farmed countryside. Most waterbodies in the project area are small, comprising streams, ponds and ditches. In total, freshwaters occupy about 0.5% of the land surface. Individually, streams comprise the largest part of the water environment, followed by ditches and ponds. There are no lakes (water bodies of 2 ha or more) or rivers (defined as linear watercourses marked by two blue lines on Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 scale maps) in the project area.
The Barkby Brook
The Barkby Brook is a tributary of the River Soar.
This catchment acts as the control, which means we are not adding any measures to the site. That means we can monitor background changes in the landscape in this catchment.
The Eye Brook
The Eye Brook drains towards the River Welland.
This is one of our two experimental catchment in which we are implementing water protection and hydrological measures. These include ‘leaky dams’ to increase the landscape’s flood storage capacity.
The Stonton Brook
The Stonton Brook is our second experimental catchment and it also drains towards the River Welland.
In this catchment, we are not only implementing water protection and hydrological measures but also additional physical habitat enhancement for biodiversity, including clean water ponds. This allows us to assess the combined effect of both types of measures.