This is our home and we love it. We want to be working with our landscape not against it. When we took on the land it had been let for keep for many years and had suffered a lack of investment. We have invested in relocating buildings and renewing fencing to improve the efficiency of the farm whilst giving the most biodiverse areas of the farm back to nature. We are flanked by tributaries to the river Exe, and these have been fenced off with riparian buffers to allow nature recovery and improve water quality. We have integrated herbal leys onto former arable land to improve soil quality, provide habitat for insect species and to improve the efficiency of our sheep production. We use very little parasite treatment to protect the insect and aquatic life on the farm and do this through careful management and rotation. Changes we have made to promote nature recovery include:
Planting of 1.5km of new hedges with more agroforestry options in the pipeline
Ponds and silt traps
Woody dams to slow run-off and promote wet woodland
Over 100 nest boxes for small birds as well as bat, raptor and owl boxes
Planting 12,000 trees across 10 hectares of the farm where it buffers the watercourses