11
Wetland Futures Report 2013: The Value of Healthy Wetlands
Catchment Sensitive Farming
James Grischeff, Senior Advisor, Natural England
is being used or handled on the holding. However,
agriculture is an inherently leaky system so even the
most efficient application the use of potentially polluting
products are likely to result in some movement away
from the target crop or issue. Consequently, the likely
pathway for the movement of the pollutant with water
flow from the source to the receiving water body should
be broken or slowed to allow the pollutant to drop out.
Finally, the water body or receptor can be protected or
buffered so that any remaining pollutant can be stopped
before it causes a problem.
Wetlands and other water holding features across
the farm have the potential to break this pathway
and sometimes effectively treat the pollutant before it
becomes a problem. However, the placement of these
features within the landscape is important to ensure they
are most effectively and efficiently placed in consideration
of all water flows accumulating from the potential sources
of pollution in a size and formation that is best able to
treat them. A well constructed wetland in a corner of a
field that does not treat drainage waters may be next to
useless in breaking the connectivity between source fields
and the sensitive water body.
A farming perspective
Richard Murray Wells, Farmer
•
Propose using agricultural land to store flood water
at peak times. Suggest farmers / landowners would
be agreeable at a commercial rate. As a result
areas given over to flooding could farm more water
resilient crops or animals and be more secure in
planting valuable and more water phobic crops on
other fields.
•
Consider making the storage of flood water, in
defined areas, an agri-environment option. Possibly
only applicable as a ‘community scheme’ in
association with others farmers.
•
Consider this approach against the cost of improving
or extending town flood defences.
In follow up questions we discussed, amongst other
things, whether insurance companies might be prepared
to financially contribute to this.
In 2006
Catchment Sensitive Farming
(CSF) launched to
help farmers tackle Diffuse Water Pollution from Agriculture
(DWPA) in 40 (now over 74) priority catchments across
England using training and incentives on a voluntary basis.
Priority catchments have been chosen in order to help
meet the requirements of the Water Framework Directive
and freshwater Sites of Special Scientific Interest, where
the best available evidence suggest that farming makes a
significant contribution to the pollution problem. The CSF
project has been a significant success story with well over
12,000 holdings (1.9 Million hectares) positively engaging
with the project. This has resulted in tens of thousands
of pollution reduction measures with real environmental
outcomes and reductions in pollution predicted to be
between 5 and 10% (up to 36%) across Target Areas.
In order to reduce pollution from farms we need to ensure
priority is given to measures that reduce the specific
pollutant causing problems in the local water body (a
list of well researched measures is available within the
DWPA User Guide
and the
Voluntary Initiative
).
Pollution needs to be tackled at the source of the
problem, considering how and how much of the pollutant
River Severn in flood, Slimbridge
photo: James Lees
