How farmers changed their management in wake of Somerset floods

It has been three years since the Somerset Levels were hit by flooding and, in that time, much has changed.

Farms have had to change the way they manage their land, both on the levels themselves and in surrounding higher ground.

But there are important lessons that can be learned, especially as policymakers try to develop new ways of supporting farmers post-Brexit in a way that has wider public appeal.

This time three years ago, the water was rising fast around James Winslade’s farmhouse in the Somerset Levels.

Within a week, it would be half way up his first floor window and, after a hasty exit, James, his wife, aging parents and his 600 cattle would be temporarily lodged in different locations around the county.

It would stay that way for the next three-and-a-half months, until they could finally return at the start of spring to a farm and home devastated by water damage.

See also: Somerset farmer’s flood struggle

At the time, while news of the “worst floods in 250 years” dominated headlines, it was stories about the outpouring of support from farmers and communities nationwide that most captured the nation’s attention.

Following a tweet sent out by Mr Winslade’s wife asking for help getting emergency forage for their cattle, farmers around Britain sent hundreds of tonnes of silage down to Somerset, in what the NFU said was the largest movement of forage in British history.

Helping hands quickly followed, coming from as far away as Scotland to shift and feed livestock from flooded farms.

But while collaboration is the success story of the floods of winter 2013-14, it was the lack of joined-up thinking among different quarters that has been widely blamed for causing the problem in the first place.

While the rainfall experienced in Somerset was exceptional, responsibility for the subsequent flooding was spread wide.

Under-dredged watercourses, poor urban planning decisions and land management in the upper river catchments were all blamed.

Without a collaborative approach, the combined effect of water moving inexorably from hills to levels, had been all but ignored as local councils, business and farmers all chased their own goals.

The result was devastating, both economically and emotionally.

Suicides spiked in the months after the floods as people came to terms with the damages.

The total bill for the floods was put at £147m, while farmers such as the Winslades were left many thousands of pounds in debt.

New approach

In the aftermath of the floods, there was a realisation that, in order to prevent such an event happening again, things needed to be managed differently.

While dredged rivers, upgraded drainage and pumping stations could better remove excess water in times of need, the solution would have to look to the cause as well as the effect.

Ben Thorne is a senior farm conservation adviser with the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group South West (FWAG SW).

Along with other partners like the Royal Bath & West Society, local Wildlife Trust and RSPB, he helped set up the Hills to Levels project in summer 2014.

The project looks to manage flooding through natural processes, working with farmers across the entire 350,000ha of the Somerset Levels catchment.

It is funded by Players of the People’s Postcode Lottery and forms one part of a wider flood action plan, run by the Somerset Rivers Authority (SRA). 

To date, Mr Thorne and his team of advisers have worked with more than 750 farmers, from the Mendip Hills down through the levels and up towards Exmoor, to create land use change that will help prevent flooding in the future.

“The nature of water is to move on and, for all but the lowest lying farms, to quickly become someone else’s problem”, he says.

“But this belies the nature of how water and land management work together – every farm, every field and every stream has a part to play in managing flooding.

“To prevent flooding in the long term, we need to think on a catchment scale and to look at the natural processes that can slow water down as it runs off the hills.

“We are encouraging farmers in the hills and farmers on the levels to work together to make this happen.”

Water storage

Central to the Hills to Levels approach is the role soil can play in storing water. Drawing on available funding from the SRA as well as Countryside Stewardship schemes, FWAG SW encourages farmers to use a range of methods to improve soil health and structure, from subsoiling through to sowing deep rooting leys.

This can both “slow the flow of water while also bringing multiple other benefits to farmers and society, from improved fertility through to enhanced biodiversity”, says Mr Thorne.

Alongside the focus on soil, FWAG SW is also working with farmers to create natural barriers in places where water flow is fastest.

Farmers are being funded to build bunds, construct woody dams in streams and put in leaky ponds.

“We have detailed maps that allow us to understand how and where water moves in different weather events,” says Mr Thorne.

“And we know the natural processes that store it, slow it and direct it.

“The goal is to restore those processes to allow natural features to minimise flood risk not only for farmers and local villages, but for the big towns that lie in the flood plains as well.”