Farming Life on the Wild Side

Open a newspaper, switch on the news or do a bit of thumb scrolling on social media and you won’t have failed to see articles about the impact of climate change across the world.

Closer to home, the news is no better, with numbers of UK native wild birds in decline being high on the list. Farming has always been used as a punch bag for the media to offload its opinions when it comes to environmental misdemeanours, so you could be forgiven for thinking that farmers care not for the environment that we live and work in.

But here at Oak Park Dairy, we have always striven to create habitats that encourage wildlife. We have often shunned subsidies, government payments that have been offered for environmental schemes, as we feel that our surrounding ecosystem is something to enjoy, encourage and create intuitively and not because we have been asked to do so.

For any of you who buy our honey, you will know that bees play a huge role in life here on the farm. Our resident beekeeper (Mum!) produces 100’s of jars of honey from her active hives therefore it is vitally important that we keep our very own Queen Bee and her buzzy friends happy! Creating habitats worthy of their hard work goes without saying and the additional benefits are that it’s not just the bees and Mum that are happy, the local population of birds, rodents and invertebrates as well. Last year we grew an experimental acre of sunflowers with the aim to create a source of nectar for our bees and other pollinators, as well as a source of food for field birds later in the year once the sunshine blooms had faded. We had envisaged cutting the sunflowers after flowering as a ‘feed’ for our electricity generation, but in the end we let the seeds scatter and the stems to mulch down as a green manure. The Fieldfares, pheasants and fat pigeons have had a grand old time picking over the remaining seeds.

Another means of feeding the bird population through the harsher months is one of our Winter Bird mixes. After cropping our maize silage, we sow a mix of cereals and brassicas that attract a variety of species to the fields. Anyone who grows their own veg will know how hard it is to keep birds from eating their young cabbage seedlings, but in our case, we are actively encouraging their attendance.

Field margins are also an incredible source of food for all wildlife and not just the birds. Mice, voles, shrews you name it, they love it and so do the buzzards, kestrels and owls! We keep the grass margins wider and allow the native grasses to just ‘do their thing’. This attracts not only the daytime pollinators but also the night-time ones too. Don’t forget, moths are one of natures’ hardest working pollinators, but people don’t give them a second thought as all their work is carried out under the cover of darkness.

In turn, the moth provides a tasty morsel for the bat population. Bats love to work small areas, using the woodland and hedgerow margins for cover. Large expanses of monoculture are not suitable for these nocturnal creatures and so the vast tracts of Devon hedgerows along with smaller field sizes create the perfect smorgasbord for the local bat population. The next time you are driving a ‘Devon mile’ on the country lanes of East Devon, don’t think about how long it is taking to get to Exeter, think about the miles of hedgerows that you are passing and the life they hold within them.

And we couldn’t do a piece on habitats without mentioning our namesake the Oak . Here on the farm we have many old Oaks in various stages of living and dying. Wonderful structures that have watched people coming and going during the centuries they have stood on the farm. A fact that you may or may not know is that an oak tree can accommodate an astonishing 2300 species, and that doesn’t include all of the fungi and micro-organisms that inhabit the oak. Even as they enter their latter years, when their hearts start to become fodder for invertebrates and their hollows become a home for a Tawny owl or a hornets’ nest, they still play a vital role in the lifecycle on the farm. We can only hope that long after we are gone, they will still be here.

“It takes 300 years for an oak tree to grow, 300 years to stay and 300 years to die”

an old Foresters proverb, England