Wetter farming working wonders

Wetter farming, or paludiculture, could be the future of sustainable, climate-friendly farming on our lowland peatlands. Jenny Bennion finds out how your Wildlife Trust is right at the forefront of this exciting innovation.

Huge areas of the once great Chat Moss peatland in Greater Manchester, and other lowland peatlands right across our region, have been lost due to drainage and conversion to agriculture. Once heralded as the revolutionary answer to feeding our burgeoning industrial populations, we now know the extreme effect that draining peatlands does to our increasingly collapsing climate.

Peatlands are naturally wet and boggy, slowly increasing their stores of carbon rich peat, as their lower layers of vegetation only partially decompose in the acidic and waterlogged conditions.

However, as soon as a peatland is drained the peat is exposed to the air, causing all that precious carbon to oxidise. Carbon plus oxygen equals carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that is released into the atmosphere exacerbating the climate emergency.

In fact, emissions from degraded peatlands make up at least four per cent of the UK’s annual greenhouse gas inventory, similar to that of aviation. But there is a solution, by re-wetting the peat we can drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are released, trapping that carbon back underground again.

At our Winmarleigh carbon farm we saw a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the site of almost 90 per cent – in just one year!

However, that solution can also cause a problem. What about all of the farmers that need to make a living from their lowland peat farms? After all, let’s not forget that after the Second World War and beyond farmers were being subsidised by the government to drain peatland and turn it into farmland. This is where wetter farming, or paludiculture, comes in.

Wetter farming is the practice of re-wetting land and then growing crops which thrive in these wetter conditions. It acts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the land, whilst also keeping it financially viable for farmers and landowners. And your Wildlife Trust is right at the forefront of this exciting new development, trialling new crops and re-wetting techniques that have never been tried before.