News
by Freshwater Habitats Trust
Water Friendly Farming is our largest current research project and we are now beginning the next important phase of this project.
Water Friendly Farming’s aim is to provide us with the information we need about what works best when it comes to protecting freshwaters from the unwanted damaging impacts of commercial farming. Specifically, we are trying to find out whether we can reduce the impact on freshwater biodiversity across the whole landscape, reduce water pollution and hold back water in an effort to reduce downstream flooding.
To do this we are running a large experiment to assess the combined effect of the wide range of mitigation methods used to try to reduce the impact of farming on freshwaters. Methods include reducing the amount of ploughing and adding buffer strips to stop soil and fertilisers washing off the land, damming ditches to intercept polluted water and trap sediment, and adding new freshwater habitat to the landscape, particularly ponds, to provide better quality habitat for freshwater wildlife.
Work of this sort is inevitably long-term: although we are now five years into the project, much of that time has been spent establishing the baseline conditions. If you want to understand whether making changes to the landscape is having any effect it’s important to know how things were before you started, and it’s also important to have an area to compare with where you change nothing, which statisticians call the control. All of this makes work like Water Friendly Farming expensive: one of the biggest challenges of this kind of work is finding the large sums of money for the work.
Our baseline work has provided important information, and has given us the foundations for some interesting early results. These results are described in the report we produced at the end of 2014.
Water Friendly Farming is a good example of our partnership approach and is run jointly with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust and a range of other partners, including the University of York and University of Sheffield, Oxford Brookes University, the Environment Agency (who are the biggest funders of the work) and Syngenta.