Make a donation

Help fund our work to amplify nature-friendly farming’s benefits to farmers and policymakers across the UK

Policy & Views

Read a variety of articles, including topical blogs, comment pieces on policy developments and updates on key moments in farming.

Campaigns

Catch up with our latest campaigns and find out more about our work.

Farm Practices

Explore information on many aspects of nature-friendly farm practices.

What is the NFFN?

Discover our mission, our vision and the challenge we meet.

Meet The Team

Meet the farmers in our regional steering groups and the staff team at our core

FAQs

Got a question about nature-friendly farming? We've got it covered here

Supporters

We're proud to work with many organisations who support our mission.
Resources

Slowing The Flow: Flooding On Farms

United Kingdom
Farm Practices
natural flood management
slow the flow

Flooding has a devastating impact on people’s lives. Turn on the news after rivers have burst their banks, and the screen will be filled with harrowing images of homes and businesses ruined and piles of soggy, stinking possessions. This nightmare is also something more of us will face more often in the future, thanks to climate change. Met Office analysis suggests that during the 21st century, the UK will experience heavier, more intense rain during the summer, with extreme rainfall becoming more common as well.

Farms are on the front line when it comes to flooding. At the start of 2024, Storm Henk contributed to swathes of the English Midlands being underwater and farming unions demanding compensation for thousands of acres of wrecked crops. The likelihood of flooding becoming more common and rainfall becoming heavier raises major questions about future food security. Across the UK, people and institutions are asking: ‘How do we slow the flow?’

Can nature provide us with answers?

Farmers in the NFFN are finding ways of responding to extreme weather events while continuing to produce food, keeping their business viable and helping nature to thrive. The NFFN supports using nature-based solutions for flood management alongside measures involving engineering, technology, or infrastructure building.

The government defines natural flood management as a way of reducing the risk of flooding by using “processes which protect, restore and mimic natural functions in catchments or on floodplains to slow or store water”. It has also received a thumbs-up from the Environment Agency, which has indicated that it should stand “shoulder to shoulder” with hard flood defences.

NFFN CEO Martin Lines highlights how nature-based flooding solutions can work in the two very different landscapes the government speaks about. “In the uplands, we need to keep water on the hillsides for longer within catchments,” he says. “On floodplains, we need room for the water to expand across farmland.”

‘One-third of my farm can be underwater.’

For Debbie Wilkins, who farms on around 900 acres at Norton Court Farm in Gloucestershire, floodwater management is a massive and crucial part of her farming practice. Her farm is near the River Severn, and the heavy rainfall at the start of 2024 saw 300 acres underwater. It’s a public good she is happy to provide, but one which requires a great deal of thinking about how the business is going to remain viable.

“Most of our floodplain meadows are species-rich hay meadows, but we’ve also got arable land, which we’ve taken out of use because you can only spring crop it. You can’t gamble with a winter crop like winter wheat because you would often lose it. We converted the arable land to herbal leys, which could survive being flooded,” she says.

We’re just used to it, and it’s how we farm, though we’re lucky because we’ve still got two-thirds of our land that doesn’t flood. It allows us to balance things. We’re farming quite extensively because you can’t push the flood meadows too hard.

Debbie Wilkins

Debbie has noticed that climate change is making severe flooding more frequent. She says having 300 acres of her farm being used to hold water is typical of a “big flood”, but these have gone from occurring every four to six years to possibly happening more than once in 12 months. She has also noticed changes in the weather, which are making the problem worse.

Debbie is used to having up to six feet of water on her floodplain meadows when the Severn spills its banks, while the lowest fields can have as much as 10 feet of water. “Some of my family kayak round the fields when they’re flooded, and they can paddle over the tops of the gates quite easily,” she says. 

Turning unproductive land into space for nature makes business and flooding sense

Another NFFN farmer looking at natural ways to hold the water back is Ruth Ashton-Shaw from Low Auldgirth Steading in Dumfries and Galloway. The River Nith flows at the boundary of her land, and she is just a few miles upstream from the town of Dumfries, which has a centre notorious for flooding problems.

“We’re very conscious of how we can hold the water on our land to protect everybody downstream,” Ruth says. “It directly affects our customers and community.”

Ruth has one field completely omitted from the grazing rotation during the winter months, and a particularly boggy area has been turned into a wetland for nature. She says adopting nature-friendly farming practices and working with her land rather than against it has been massively important for the success of her farm.

“Where the wetland is now, we were constantly fighting to keep that area drained,” she says. “It was costing us more and more, getting more contractors to look at it. Sheep were picking up parasites going on there. It was a downward spiral. It’s now the first place where the grass starts growing in spring, and somewhere we don’t have to worry about. It’s had zero impact on the farm's profitability because it’s a small, unproductive space now given over to the greater good.

We can see right up the valley and can tell where the water runs brown into the river and where it runs clear. It’s all about management and water retention across the farm.

Ruth Ashton-Shaw

Flood management while farming cattle and tackling erosion

The choice of crops grown on farms can also significantly affect how the land responds to floodwater. When Sam Kenyon moved onto Glanllyn Farm in North Wales, she found that tenanted fields had been used for growing maize and ploughed right up to a vertical river bank, resulting in considerable field edge erosion. Sam took the fields back from crop growing and pasture and turned it all into grassland to enable her to capture the nutrients from floods.

In 2020, the farm was deluged by three floods in the space of two months in the winter, while lifelong residents of the area told Sam floodwater was travelling faster and more aggressively along the land. Sam realised it was up to landowners to devise the solutions to the problem. She was advised to scrape away the riverbank to create a 30-degree angle because the slope would deposit sediment rather than erode it. She was also told to coppice willow trees from around the farm and bury the trunks in the banks. This acted as a catalyst for regenerating tree growth along the banks from a dormant seed bank in the earth or the trunks, protecting the farm and fields from flooding.

She is planning to help protect communities downstream from flooding with an ambitious flood management project to divert water from the river's tributaries flowing through the farm into a series of scrapes feeding a basin of wet woodland, which she will plant. This will then channel water into a ditch with a small bund. She sums up her experiences: “It has been a real learning curve in having the right tree in the right place and how habitat can build resilience into our farmland.”

NFFN England steering group chair James Robinson also uses natural flood management on his grassland dairy farm at Strickley in Cumbria. The farm is situated in the upper catchment of several becks, and James has to battle against the historic over-management of the area. In some places, becks have almost been turned into canals, with the water elevated above the surrounding land. This is poor for ecology and poses real problems for a future of higher-intensity rainfall and more frequent flooding.  

James’ response balances the need to enhance habitat for nature, mitigate flooding, bring in income to the farm and help with agricultural management. He has planted around 10 acres of riparian wood pasture, serving the dual purpose of natural flood management and providing shelter and shade for his pedigree native breed livestock.

James has also done some beck “rewiggling”, a term coined by his fellow Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks. Hundreds of years ago, a beck running through Strickley was straightened out, so James has now overseen this being turned into a much more meandering flow through ponds and scrapes. This immediately impacted biodiversity, with dragonflies laying their eggs there, a pair of snipe nesting and reed buntings using it. Otters have also been seen in Strickley’s becks.

Sam and James both understand that a major cause of damage to riverbanks is grazing cattle coming to drink. James has fenced off many of his becks and has installed two solar-powered water pumps to deliver water to other parts of the farm for the animals. “We’re taking water to the cows rather than the cows to the water,” he explains.