The Brooks Family from Thorness have joined a pilot to help the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs improve the Sustainable Farming Incentive offering to farms up and down the country.
For over a century, the family has worked South Thorness Farm, which is within the Hamstead Heritage Coast Area Of Natural Beauty to the west of Cowes.
In a video diary for DEFRA, sisters Jess and Sarah, along with their parents Adrian and Joyce, run through the management of the farm and their decision to join the pilot, as well as giving a small insight into the world of modern day farming here on the Island.
Jess explains that the farm plays host to more than you may think with interesting wildlife like red squirrels, brown hares, skylarks and swallows, as well as barn owls and kestrels and hazel dormice in the hedges. There are also numerous species of butterflies in the area, as well as different types of dragonfly and damselfly.
The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is the first of 3 new environmental schemes being introduced by the Government under the Agricultural Transition Plan. SFI aims to help farmers manage land in a way that improves food production and is more environmentally sustainable.
Farmers are being paid to provide public goods, such as improved water quality, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and animal health and welfare.
The Brooks family are passionate about the role small grassland farms can play in the future of our countryside and they intend to protect and enhance their farm’s exceptionally diverse wildlife.
Jess says:
“We’re entering the Sustainable Farming Incentive because we believe that small grassland farms like ours have an important role to play in the future of the countryside, and 55 acres like we have here doesn’t seem like very much, but we do have a part to play, and it’s not an insignificant amount of land and we can sequester carbon here, we can attract and support more wildlife, and we can lock down nutrients and help clean water”.
Is this the farm that looks an absolute tip on the way to Thorness Bay Holiday park.
We have relatives staying there in July and I am ashamed to drive them past that dump leading to the park.
They need to be made to clean up.
God knows what people think who have arrived on Holiday.
No It’s not that one
The first thing is to dump all chemicals pesticide’s and weed killers