Guest blog written by local sheep farmer Sidney Hiscox. 

The cry to help our biodiversity in Britain is currently a loud one, and it is wonderful how many people are hearing it, and yet we still find ourselves losing grip on our depleting nature. For the last five years, I have taken a more active role in our farm and I’d like to share some of the joy I have experienced from helping nature on it, in the hope it might inspire others. 

In Wiltshire, we have 180 acres that are farmed with sheep (in a 500-acre farm partnership). Imagine a rectangular block, consisting of rolling fields with two shallow valleys. On the northern boundary is a road, on the western and eastern fronts are other farms, and at the bottom is the canal with a beautiful 81-acre nature reserve the other side, made up of wet woodland and meadows.

When we took over the land in 2016 it was all grassland with one wide, grown out hedge, a few infield oaks that show up on a map from 1812, and a 2-acre wood largely made up of swaying poplars. Today 65 acres of it is currently arable and the rest is herbal ley pasture.

The previous farmer had once farmed pigs but for his final few years he hadn’t really touched the land. Long grass grew over the fields and when you walked through it hare and roe deer popped up and bounded away. When we first purchased it, we had an over-enthusiastic farm manager who set about maximising the land for sheep grazing. The farm was re-fenced, the wild grass sprayed off and reseeded and I once found him ripping out a hedge on the western boundary just to replace a perfectly good fence. It wasn’t his fault. Sheep farming as a viable business is touch and go at the best of times and he was only trying to maximise pasture but now I look back in dismay when I think about the habitat taking out like a greensand spring that bubbled out of the land that was diverted into a ditch via a pipe just to add a tiny patch of grass to grazing.

When I started taking a more active role, I loved the outdoors but I was a beginner to what could be done to help nature. However, once you start reading about habitat creation, there is a bottomless cave to explore. Today I often find myself ignoring my day job so I can read a report on conservation grazing or watch a YouTube video titled Top 3 Mistakes When Mulching Fruit Trees.

Before we dive into the different habitats on the farm, there are two confessions I need to make. First, I'm in the fortunate position where others in the farm partnership focus on the sheep and crops, so I can devote my time to habitat creation. I'm by no means a wealth of knowledge on farming, but I like to think I now know a little bit about habitats. Secondly, there is no denying I’m an extremely lucky type of landowner. The farm isn’t my family’s sole source of income and this has allowed me the space to experiment with habitats on land that would otherwise be needed for farming.

It all began with a pond. A seasonal ditch runs the length of one of the shallow valleys and in 2017 we put in a 0.2-acre pond in the middle of it. Being on greensand we had to line the pond which was no small feat and for the first year it looked ornamental with no surrounding plant life. So, we planted a shrubby copse on one side of it and slowly planted the water’s margins and six years later, it is a sight to behold. On a summer’s evening, I will go sit there and bathe in the life that now inhabits it.

Wild mint has loved the margins, and bees will bumble from flower to flower while dragonflies buzz everywhere like drones. Swallows and martins gracefully dive bomb the water and mallard squabble away as they use the shallows as an all you can eat buffet. On a trail cam I have even watched slick otters emerge from the water and slink away. This pond has become my pride and joy, and was the spark that made me realise the pleasure you can get from creating habitat that helps nature thrive on a working farm.

Since putting in the pond we have left the grass either side of the long ditch to grow into rank grassland as an experiment. To look upon it on a winter’s day, the grass is battered by the wind and rain and lives up to its name. One is prone to think it is devoid of life and you can read that this type of grassland has limited biodiversity value. However, as the moon rises and the light fades, if you stay still you can watch the white majesty of a barn owl glide into the picture. It calmly monitors the rough grass, until it dives down to bag a field vole.

By letting this thick grass grow tall in the summer and then collapse in the autumn, we unintentionally created at the bottom what is known as a litter layer, a crucial home for these voles. As well as our common shrew and wood mouse, the field vole uses the litter layer for its tunnels and nests and if you part the grass and search you can sometimes spot these small tunnels.

Next, I moved onto trees, something the farm lacked. In 2020, in the innocent weeks before Coronavirus first reached our shores, we fenced off 10 acres to plant a wood. We planted 5 acres of it with around 2,500 trees in a horseshoe with a glade in the middle. It was a mix of broadleaf and fruiting trees and while it will take many decades for it to establish, I still find myself going to check it daily and leave convincing myself I can notice its snail-paced progress.

One thing we did discover was the birds loved the rough grassland around the trees and you can now hear skylarks singing to their heart’s content. The fields above and below the wood are arable and we now stop the drill on small 6 by 6 metre patches to create bare plots for these skylarks. This is one of the main discoveries about habitat creation. When you pause and watch, you will discover so much that you can then use to implement more nature helping practices.

It isn’t always perfect, and you’re always learning. To the east of this new woodland was another 3 acres in the fenced off block and we seeded it with wildflowers. At the time I had been reading how we should minimise ploughing and tilling so rather than creating a lovely seedbed for the wildflowers, we instead grazed the grass right down and harrowed it before spreading the seed. It means the wildflowers will have to do battle with the grass but I’m happy for the meadow to take its time. Like so much conservation work, there’s a great deal of delayed gratification to it. In this age where we demand instant results, this kind of work does wonders forcing you to pause and appreciate the slow progress. Luckily, we sourced the wildflowers from a meadow on Salisbury plain that contained a lot of yellow rattle, and in the meadow’s first summer this helped knock back the grass and we will have to wait to see how the other flowers do next year.

Diving into this world allows you to meet many wonderful people. After the woodland, we put in 1.7 km of hedgerows to connect the landscape and planted two more one-acre copses. I presumed trees were the answer to helping Britain’s birds. That was until I met Matt Prior who spends all his hours outside of his day job helping Wiltshire’s birdlife. He is a tour de force and I had him over to get his advice. He opened my eyes to the differentiating woodland and farmland birds. I had previously lumped them together but he patiently explained that farmland birds are in a much more dire position and don’t benefit from our woodland.

So now we are thinking more about which fields we can take hay off, allowing the grass to grow over summer to help these birds, and in our arable fields we let the wide margins grow long or seed them with wildflowers. Matt also recommended bolstering our winter bird feeding programme. We already had farmland bird feeders over the hungry gap, between January and March, but we now extend that into May. We received a grant to plant 5 acres with a winter bird food crop that provides food for farmland birds over the winter and its flowering plants help insects in the summer. When I visited it on a sunny day this March, the area was alive with linnets, reed buntings, skylarks and dunnocks singing uproariously.

Another one Matt band is the charming Matt Somerville and his focus is on our wild honeybees. Back in 2019, he came over to erect a log hive. As the name might suggest, this is a hollowed-out log with a capacity of around 50 litres. Matt makes them himself and they're not used to collect honey but purely to provide the ideal habitat for a honey bee colony.

I stayed ground level, waffling away, while the grey-haired Matt effortlessly hoisted himself high up into an oak to secure the heavy hive into place. Before Matt leaves it, he puts some lemongrass oil by the holes. He told me the Romans discovered that this attracts bees and science later confirmed that lemongrass and the nasonov pheromone scout bees leave when they find a potential home both contain citral.

Every day I checked it, waiting for the bees to arrive and when they did, it was a simple pleasure to stand under it, watching them come and go with purpose, and on a very hot summer’s day almost the whole colony can be found hanging out on the outside of the log, doing something known as ‘bearding’.

It is hard to concisely condense why it’s so important to help our wild bees but they're suffering almost from every angle. They have reduced forage, battle against systemic pesticides and new disease, and, if domesticated, they’re massively stressed by modern conventional husbandry and exploited for honey and profit. When you meet people like Matt, you cannot help getting drunk on their enthusiasm (they will also both convince you that nipping 20 metres up into a tree to get face to face with a wild bee colony is as normal as watching TV). Like Matt Prior and his birds, Matt is passionately committed to helping our honey bees and you can see the joy it brings him. As a result, this year we have two more of Matt’s Freedom Log Hives arriving for our whole farm partnership.

Our final and most recent habitat we are establishing is causing me great excitement. At the beginning of this year, we planted a 2.5 acre traditional orchard that includes apples, pears, plums, mulberries, and more all nicely spaced out. This was the direct result of reading the book Orchard by Nick Gates and Benedict Macdonald. I implore everyone to read it and revel in their nature writing as they take you through a year at an incredibly biodiverse ancient cider orchard.

Traditional, low intervention orchards can be added to the long list of disappearing habitats in the UK. They are hard to make commercially viable and are often sacrificed to urban expansion or more commercial farming and yet they're one of the best habitats for our wildlife, for their value lies in their mosaic composition of woodland, pasture, meadow grassland, hedgerows and crucially deadwood.

Not only do the fruit trees provide blossom for pollinators and the fruit for all manner of animals, but they age much quicker than other British hardwoods and that means they're a good source of deadwood. Deadwood is often interpreted as the sign of a sick tree or, if fallen, seen as a mess to be tidied (nature hates tidiness), but it is in fact vital. Fallen deadwood feeds the soil as it decomposes while standing deadwood on trees provides crevices and hollows that are used to nest in by birds and bats, and both support a huge range of deadwood-dependent insects.

Our orchard is young, just a newborn, but an ambition of mine is to one day see a lesser spotted woodpecker in it, and, selfishly, its quick ageing fruit trees mean that I will see them come to maturity much faster than any of the other woodland we have planted.

If there is one thing I have learnt from all this habitat creation, beyond the joy it brings me and the wildlife, it is that it’s a landowner’s duty to help nature. Yes, a farm needs to be a viable business, yes we have to feed the nation, but we have to make sure nature plays an equal role alongside those two. That should be non-negotiable, and at many places it already is. I also now appreciate how hard farmer’s have it. They’re asked to provide cheaper and cheaper food, but also asked to help nature more and more. They choose to do a job that has no nice 9-5 working hours or weekends, they constantly wrestle with unpredictable weather, battle against supermarkets forcing lower and lower prices (the fact that you can buy a £2.09 whole chicken from a supermarket should be alarming), and get vilified for not helping nature and never championed when they do. Many people cleverer than me can talk more wisely about the future of farming. My real focus is on habitat creation, but with the Increasing understanding and enthusiasm around regenerative farming techniques and other practices, I’m hopeful we can produce food and help nature at the same time.

There are plenty more plans I want to implement. I am meeting a hydrologist about rewetting the drainage ditch and I would love to create some woodland pasture but I’m telling myself not to rush. What we have done already needs management and I’m under no illusion that all of this takes a huge amount of time and money but the satisfaction and joy it gives me greatly outweighs the invoices and days spent spreading 1,000 litres of mulch around fruit trees. Create good habitat and nature quickly finds it. Although if I was to meet my younger self, he wouldn’t be too happy I was saving my money to buy wildflower seeds rather than a shiny new car but that is what happens. Once you dive into the world of habitat creation and nature recovery, it gets a grip on you.

Follow Sidney's progress on Instagram: @wiltsnaturerecovery