Today is a special day for RSPB Hope Farm. For the first time, reserve shops across the country are selling produce from the farm – quality extra-virgin rapeseed oil! To understand why this is such a fantastic occasion, a bit of background will come in handy...
Hope Farm farmhouse - image by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)
The RSPB has owned Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire since 2000, and over the past 13 years, we’ve been trying out all sorts of ways to make the running of the farm more wildlife friendly. Over the past few decades, birds and lots of other wildlife associated with farmland have suffered serious declines due to intensification of farming practices, especially on arable farms where large and uniform swathes of crops are planted, thus destroying natural resources and habitats.
Hope farm is an arable farm, and through our work here we aim to demonstrate that good crops can be grown hand-in-hand with successful management for wildlife. Providing important habitats around the farm such as skylark patches, flower rich grassy field margins and unharvested wild bird covers have all combined to allow butterflies, bees, birds and lots of other wildlife to flourish on the farm.
Flower rich field at Hope Farm, 2012 - image by Andy Hay (rspb-imges.com)
All this hard work has meant that farmland bird species in serious decline have thrived here – skylarks have quadrupled in number, and linnet numbers have increased five-fold, while grey partridges and yellow wagtails have colonised the farm.
It’s a very exciting day, as we here at Fairburn have taken our delivery of the oil to be sold in our shop. A lot of the vegetable oil you buy in supermarkets comes from rapeseed, which has generally been processed on a massive scale; purification, grading and extraction processes remove all the distinctive character and taste of the oil. Hope Farm’s Love Nature extra-virgin rapeseed oil has not been processed this way – instead it was crushed and bottled in the same county as the farm itself, and is as close to natural as you can get.
Rape seeds from the 2012 Hope Farm crop - image by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)
Apparently it has a distinctively nutty flavour, and can be used in any way in the kitchen, from dressing and dipping to frying and roasting! We’ll be doing taste-tests in the shop here at Fairburn, so come down and see us over the next few days to enjoy a taste of Hope Farm!
I’m definitely looking forward to trying some, not only because it’s supposed to be yummy, but because of what it symbolises – if we’re to save farmland wildlife in this country, something needs to change, and this might just be the beginning.