Hope Farm: 2014 has been so much better

The last two years have been very challenging at Hope Farm with lower numbers of breeding birds than our high point in 2011, and disappointing crop yields. The summer of 2012 will long be etched in many of our memories with the incessant rain after a prolonged drought, which had a considerable impact on the crops, and almost certainly led to reduced breeding success for our birds.

It was a salutary lesson that, even on a farm where we deliver the Big 3: safe nesting habitat, abundant insect rich habitat and plentiful seed rich areas, the weather can have such a big impact on our wildlife. The poor breeding success in 2012 could have well have had a knock on effect leading to reduced numbers of adult birds during the 2013 breeding season, and our breeding bird index dipped to an uncomfortably low level although still well above the level we found in 2000 when we first bought Hope Farm.

How much worse would it have been for our farm wildlife if we hadn’t put in place all the quality habitat and full range of resources through our agri-environment scheme and voluntary measures?

Thankfully, the weather during the summer of 2013 was kinder to us and breeding success was much better than in 2012. This gave us some confidence that the number of breeding birds in 2014 would increase again. Despite having this confidence it was still a nervous period when the breeding bird survey began. Would the skylarks bounce back? Would the kestrel and lapwings return?

I am very pleased to tell you that any lingering doubts were soon allayed, skylarks were back in abundance, kestrels were seen on most of the surveys and lapwings exceeded all expectations.

Having been at Hope Farm since 2006 it is very easy to become blasé about the number of skylarks and other birds here, but it really is amazing to think we have virtually quadrupled our breeding skylark population from 10 territories in 2000 to 38 territories this year, and a high of 44 territories in 2009. The only thing we do to help our skylarks is provide safer nesting habitat by providing ‘skylark plots’, small bare areas within each wheat field, which research has shown increases productivity by around 50%. Sadly very few of my fellow farmers have these plots on their farms.

It was also a delight to see lapwings displaying over the farm again, after an absence last year. An arable farm is a challenging place for lapwings to nest at. They prefer large areas of bare, or sparsely vegetated ground. The predominance of autumn sown crops on arable farms isn’t to the liking of lapwings, they much prefer spring sown crops, or fallow.

We had two fields of fallow this year. This was an agronomic decision to allow us to tackle a very high blackgrass burden in these fields, as well as improve the field drainage. The lapwings found these fields to their liking, along with a field where the oilseed rape crop had failed. We found four nests, which is the most during RSPB ownership, of which three successfully hatched. Sadly only one chick definitely fledged, but even that was a considerable boost to our morale.

Overall, our breeding bird index rose again to the third-highest recorded since 2000. On average this means that the 17 species we intensively monitor have increased their populations by 190% since 2000. This is especially gratifying when the trend of the same group of species across England and East Anglia is still going down.

And it hasn't just been limited to birds, our butterflies had a great year as well. Gone are the dark days of that summer of 2012 when seeing more than 10 butterflies in total on a farm walk was a challenge. The last two years have been a real pleasure with clouds of butterflies, especially in late summer over some of our flower-rich margins. While the farm's butterfly index has fluctuated much more than the breeding bird index the trend is similar and our early estimate is that overall our butterfly numbers are up 178% since 2000. 23 species were recorded this year which I think is a remarkable achievement on a conventional arable farm. For me pride of place goes to the clouded yellows which appeared in good numbers for the second year in a row. A particularly memorable moment came when our Conservation Director identified one as it flew by Defra Deputy Director Nick Joicey, who was on a visit here.

How have we managed to do this? By ensuring we deliver sufficient areas of high quality habitat and resources, mainly through our agri-environment scheme. Of course there are many farmers out there delivering equally good, or even better, habitat and resources but unfortunately they are a minority and the majority of ELS agreements fail to deliver the Big 3, and hence do not reach their potential or increase breeding bird numbers.

The new agri-environment scheme which will be starting in 2015 will considerably raise the bar in terms of what has to be delivered, although it will be available to many fewer farmers than the current scheme. Time will tell whether fewer delivering better will help farm wildlife across England better than more doing less, but RSPB farm advisors will certainly be ready to help farmers make the most for wildlife on their farms within our key focus areas.

Of course being a farm our crops are also very important to us. Watching harvest and the grainstore fill up is as rewarding to me as listening to yellowhammers singing or seeing coveys of partridges. While our oilseed rape and peas didn’t produce particularly good yields this year, our wheat did much better than in recent years. There is still a little way to go to recover to highs of 11.7 tonnes/ha in 2008 but as we have moved to growing bread standard wheat rather than feed wheat it may be unrealistic to use that as a benchmark.

The lorries are now going in and out of the farmyard taking the wheat to the mill and our latest batch of Hope Farm rapeseed oil has been pressed and bottled, so hopefully before too long you may be sampling a little bit of Hope Farm produce in a loaf of bread, packet of biscuits or through the oil on your salad.