Our family has farmed here in North East Essex since the 1880s. In those early days the focus was on sheep, with my great grandfather developing a flock of pedigree Suffolks to graze the extensive marshes that made up most of the farm. The flock was dispersed in 1926 as part of farm re-organisation. A herd of dairy short-horns provided a milking herd at Walton hall farm through the 1940s and 50s, which my parents then evolved into freisian cattle herd. This herd moved to Devereux farm in the mid-1960s, which is where is was when I joined the farm in 1982. Sadly, as with the sheep, the dairy herd was finally sold in 2002 leaving the farm without livestock.
From 2002 the farmland has developed in two directions. Half has been devoted to growing crops of wheat, barley, peas, beans, rape and tares. The rest has been set aside to provide habitat for the wildlife associated with the neighbouring Hamford Water National Nature reserve. Habitat does not just happen, it evolves and nature evolves with it. The term biodiversity is banded about often, but a broad stable biodiversity only happens given an existing viable ecosystem being given time to expand. Our farm has had some traumatic events, such as the 1953 flood.
An uncontrolled flood drowns everything in its path. It contaminates the soil and if not dispersed back to sea, sea water is toxic to terrestrial plant life. Following the 1953 flood the sea walls were rebuilt both by digging clay from the fields closest to the walls, but also by bulldozing the topsoil from them. Before the flood many of these marshes were un-improved grazing marshes with a mix of plant species and microfauna that had been there for possibly centuries. This would of course have sustained a vibrant biodiversity. Many locals lived off plentiful stocks of fish and huge flocks of wildfowl. After 1953 all this changed. The farmland was first planted with grass and took ten years to come back into use. But the traditional grazing marshes had gone and this presented the opportunity to grow arable crops – at a time when both the UK and Europe were still recovering from the war. The early cereal crops would have yielded 2 tons an acre, which rose to 3 tons by the 1980s. But this transition from extensive grazing marsh and and its natural habitat degraded the ability of many species to remain viable in the area. This is not to say that cereal growing on the marshes removed all habitat area. Hedges remained. Wide creeks and ponds provided freshwater areas for breeding waders. Skylarks, grey plover, grey partridge could still be found, but diminishing habitat will also have an impact.
The moral of this story is that farms are not static businesses, they evolve. Over ten years ago the farm started to change again reducing its cereal growing land and returning it to become habitat. The advent of EU based agri-environmental schemes provided a choice of approaches but for our farm developing larger areas of habitat rather than just providing margins around fields seemed the right approach.
One radical project included breaching one of our sea walls to create an intertidal habitat extending a 50 acre area of mature salt marsh within Hamford Water onto our farmland. Crucially it will reduce the impact of a repeat of the 1953 flood as the sea can now flow through the breach in the sea wall and spread out across the land at Devereux farm. It has been a great success and what was once farmland has developed a biodiverse salt marsh.
Why is all this important?
This blog has been focused on the sea buckthorn crop that is developing at Devereux farm. The sea buckthorn project could not have developed if the rest of the farm was not able to support it. In time it will be the sea buckthorn which as a new enterprise will support other new projects that will drive the future viability of the farm. But what drives all of this is the appreciation of how special the working environment of a farm actually is. It grows on you and you become it. The fact it is possible to make a living from this environment is important, but it is valuing the environment as a key resource that makes the business and that will make it sustainable in the future.
This year the lack of rain will impact on all our harvest – both the sea buckthorn and the arable crops. Next year that position will hopefully be better, but if we are really seeing climate change driving different weather patterns then we will have to adapt to meet the challenge.
To a large extent though this farm has never stood still and has for over 100 years been continually changing and adapting – so whatever the weather – and maybe whatever the politics of the time, we will just carry on moving with the times.
