On Your Farm

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Getting to the heart of country life with a look at individual farming endeavours

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On Your Farm: Floodplain farming

Floodplain farming

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Floodplain farming

Sybil Ruscoe meets a Gloucestershire farmer who has learnt to live with floods.

Sybil Ruscoe visits a farm near the River Severn which regularly floods. Farmer Debbie Wilkins explains how nature-friendly farming lets the floodplain do its job of storing water.

Debbie Wilkins farms near the River Severn in Gloucestershire. With floods becoming an annual event on her land, she's learnt to live with large areas of her farm being underwater during the winter months. Earlier this year, a third of her 900 acres were flooded - but rather than seeing this as a problem, she's changing the way she farms, and finding ways to work in harmony with nature while still producing food from the land.

Sybil Ruscoe meets Debbie and hears how, as a member of the Nature-Friendly Farming Network, she's come to regard flood management as part of her farming business. Debbie knows that having her fields underwater takes the pressure off nearby residential areas at risk from flooding, and says that she's happy to just let the floodplains "do their job". She explains how she's modified what she plants in some fields, choosing grasses over arable crops, as they are better able to survive the deluge. Her strategy also results in the creation of an important wildlife habitat on the floodplain, providing a home for wading birds - as the local Farming and Wildlife Group advisor explains. Sybil also talks to a professor from the Royal Agricultural University, who says that more and more farmers are having the re-asses their decisions on what to plant and how they manage their land as they adapt to producing food in a changing climate.

Debbie takes Sybil on a tour of what she describes as her "hard-working fields": they provide floodwater storage, a habitat for wildlife, and fodder for livestock which produce food - all at the same time.

Produced by Emma Campbell

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