I love working at Wimpole Estate. It is a thousand hectares of gorgeous
Cambridgeshire countryside with an incredible history.
The changing climate is going to affect everywhere and everyone in the UK.
As an organic farm it's the plants that give us our soil quality, our nutrients
and retain the moisture in our soil so that we can be a successful farm.
It's really important that we play our part in helping nature to adapt and to farm in a sustainable way.
That means making changes to everything we do, but it's a fantastic opportunity for us to look at how we manage
and care for the land that we're responsible for.
UK agriculture is responsible for emitting about 45 million tonnes of carbon every single year.
As a modern farm we use tractors. We have buildings which need heating and lighting.
We need to dry our grain and all of our livestock emit methane.
There are so many opportunities though for us to drive us towards net zero carbon in the future.
We've been working for years to tackle climate change. I'd really like to be able to show you a few things now.
The shading from all these trees in Victoria Wood means that this actually just lies too wet,
so what we chose to do is to take it out of arable productive land. This is a gorgeous nature-rich meadow now
with a whole variety of species and just fantastic for pollinators particularly.
We've got smaller trees on the edge of the woodland here which makes a nice gradual gradated edge
that protects the species in there. With climate change we're getting heavier rainfall,
and we're getting droughtier areas. And now the fields alongside this woodland are also having the same problems.
So what we're going to do is we're going to create 50 hectares more of this wood pasture on the estate.
And that will mean planting thousands of trees, capturing carbon, and just making a home for nature.
We've got Victoria Wood at the bottom of this field. We've got the woodland belts
where Barbestelle bats live just behind us. And what we want to do is make those better connections.
What we're going to do is put a big long line of apple trees that will join the bottom wood
up to the top wood. And this will make a beautiful corridor for species to migrate
and mix between the two woodlands. That's better for nature, and it also means that actually
we continue to have an arable crop here as well as having a new crop in the form of apples.
This small corner down behind the woodland is not arably productive.
What it does give us is the opportunity generate our own renewable energy.
We installed this solar array. This gives us some great opportunities to power our buildings
and heat our buildings. We've installed well over half a million pounds of ground source and air source
heat pumps on property over the last few years. And generating your own electricity means that
you know where that electricity is coming from, and is renewable. It also gives us the opportunity
to charge our electric vehicles on site. It's really nice knowing that every time we use this vehicle
to get across the estate we are saving petrol or diesel that we would have been using before.
So another step that we've taken on Wimpole is the installation of a sustainable drainage system.
What this system does is it means that all of the water and the drainage from our visitor car park
actually drains through a series of ditches and swales and into ponds like these.
And what it means is that all that water and runoff is naturally filtered and the
silt drops out of it, and that water can then be returned to nature with no carbon being needed.
So I think it's really important for us to recognise that we couldn't do this alone.
We are being supported by a whole host of organisations.
All the work that we're going this year is going to be funded through Defra's green recovery challenge fund and HSBC,
as well as support from the European Union through the interreg funding.
I am really proud of the work that we do here. We don't just sit back and wait for this to happen.
We have been investing and changing for years, and we've got more planned for the years to come.