Pitsford Water Friendly Farming
The second Water Friendly Farming demonstration site
We’re now building on the substantial evidence base created by Water Friendly Farming.
As a second demonstration of the Water Friendly Farming approach, Pitsford Water Friendly Farming is helping us to better understand how easily we can achieve the same results. We believe this is the only other demonstration project in the world that will describe biodiversity of all waterbody types (including streams, ditches, ponds and rivers) in a farmed landscape – and at the catchment scale.
Building on the success of Water Friendly Farming
Freshwater Habitats Trust is working in partnership with Anglian Water, the Environment Agency and the farming community of the Scaldwell and Walgrave catchments in Northamptonshire.
We want to understand how we can protect and enhance the freshwater environment at a catchment scale by using landscape-wide mitigation measures. We hope to tackle the following questions:
- Can we protect and increase freshwater biodiversity without impinging on farm profitability?
- Can we reduce diffuse water pollution?
- Can we hold back water to help reduce downstream flooding?
The Pitsford Water Friendly Farming demonstration site
The project area encompasses two stream catchments in Northamptonshire: the Scaldwell and Walgrave.
The Scaldwell catchment is the impact catchment. Here, we have installed a series of intervention measures that aim to deliver benefits to freshwater biodiversity, water quality and reducing flood peaks.
The Walgrave catchment is acting as the control. This is an unmodified catchment, with no intervention measures, from which we can compare the status of the freshwater environment. This allows us to assess the effectiveness of intervention measures in the Scaldwell catchment.
Landscape Scale Mitigation Measures
Across the project area, 72 mitigation features were put in to increase freshwater biodiversity, reduce peak flows and improve water quality. These features included: