Quality and Environment
At Dove farm, we have taken on two major commitments to quality and
conservation:
To demonstrate our commitment to responsible farm management, we have joined the Genesis Whole Farm Assurance Scheme.
To demonstrate our commitment to environmental conservation,
we are participating in the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, led by DEFRA.
The Genesis Quality (GQ) Assurance Scheme is a modular set of standards that
can be applied to single enterprises, or across the whole farm. We have signed
up to whole farm assurance, which entails an ongoing commitment to codes of
practice and professional standards, with an annual, on-farm assessment by
an independent inspector.
The whole farm module covers the following issues:
• Codes of practice for safe use of chemicals
• Adherence to welfare of farmed animals, including health plans
• Competence of staff, and membership of professional organisations
• Registration with professional advisers, eg veterinary practices, agronomist.
• Record keeping, including identification and traceability of livestock
• Crop records
• Storage of crops and stock
• Maintenance of machinery
• Environmental responsibility
The Countryside Stewardship scheme is a programme which helps farmers, through
a system of grants, to enhance, restore and re-create wildlife habitats
on their land.
Farmers are either encouraged to follow more traditional methods of farming,
or are credited for doing so already.
Farmers applied to enter 10 year agreements, to manage elected sections
of their land, in an environmentally beneficial way. Small annual payments
are made in return, as well as grants towards capital works, such as hedge
laying and pond creation.
This scheme has now been replaced by the Environmental Stewardship Programme,
but existing agreements will be honoured until the end of their contracts.
At Dove Farm, these are a few of the actions we have taken and will be managing for the duration of the agreement:
• Creation of pond areas
• Conservation of two ungrazed areas at the home farm.
• Left 6m margins at the edge of cropped fields (minimum requirement
is just 1m)
• Created nesting sites for lapwings, an increasingly rare, farmland
bird.
• Committed 20 acres to arable reversion – this means taking
land out of production, and replanting traditional meadow grasses.
In addition to these formal agreements, many farms like ourselves, take
on their own ‘conservation projects’ such as putting up bird
and bat boxes, planting trees, or leaving woodpiles for hedgehogs to hibernate.
After discovering barn owl pellets beneath the ancient ash tree, on our
farm trail, we have put up barn owl boxes. During 2006, Barn Owls in general,
suffered a bad year, mainly due to a shortage of voles, their main food
supply. As we seem to have voles in plenty at Dove farm, we are keen to
help the owls out, by providing a home!
