𝗛𝗮𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘁𝗵𝘆 𝗙𝗮𝗿𝗺: 𝗮 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿, 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗻. 🐎
For over two years, we have been privileged to work on the Wild Hamatethy project with its landowners Yan & Camilla. Like all of our projects, it has been the teamwork between landowner and RESTORE that has started to deliver some amazing results, with each partner strengthening the other.
At the start of our engagement, Yan & Camilla were already light years ahead of many UK landowners. They had switched upland sheep for cattle on their land, was beginning to realise better profits, and had already reintroduced beavers to an area of the farm. The Hamatethy beaver ponds are now amongst the most gloriously chaotic and abundant micro-habitats in Cornwall: visited regularly by otters and kingfishers and home to a thriving abundance of amphibians.
RESTORE are a value-add company, not one-band heroes. With some areas of Yan & Camiila’s land already coming into great ecological shape, we began to deal with other areas of ecological emptiness that the farm had inherited. We identified that the simplified pasture needed serious work; the damage of ivermectins was still apparent in suppressed dung beetle populations, and the land needed a complex programme of establishing trees and scrub, together with putting dominant grasses on the back foot. So - it was time for porcine intervention.
In the past year at Hamatethy, we have seen cuckoos and spotted flycatchers making use of the new tree-banks established on site; increases in orchids and other wildflowers in areas rootled by pigs, and immense densities of dung-beetles following in the wake of the Exmoor ponies brought to site.
Restoring upland pastures, denuded over centuries, can be a painstaking process, but Hamatethy also shows the speed and resilience at which nature can recover.
#restorenature #cornwall #organicfarming #rewilding #naturerestoration #generationrestoration #nature #environment #regenerativefarming
3 окт 2024
