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Preventing flood damage on a farm in North Wales

Wales
Farm Practices
biodiversity
herbal leys
flood mitigation
natural flood management

When Sam Kenyon experienced flooding four times in one winter on her farm in Wales, she turned to nature-based solutions to tackle the problem. Here’s how she did it.

Glanllyn Farm, run by NFFN farmer Sam Kenyon, is located within a steep-sided part of the Elwy Valley in North Wales. This makes it susceptible to severe flooding, leading to significant erosion and land loss.

“The Elwy is known locally for its flash flooding,” Sam says. “You often see pictures of farms where the water gently spills over and sits on the land. The Elwy isn’t like that: it’s a powerful river which, when in full flow, tears at the banks during heavy rainfall. It’s like a current with the power of a machine, sweeping away everything in its path, from trees to fencing to soil.”

Matters came to a head in 2020. Glanllyn experienced three floods across February and March, with water entering the house and causing a landslide which washed away a large section of an access track. Just as the costly damage was nearly repaired, winter brought another major flood that almost inundated the farmhouse again and caused another landslide further along the same track. After working hard to improve the farm for livestock and nature (not to mention the costs involved), seeing the riverbanks being washed away faster than they could be made stable was a bitter pill to swallow.

How was the problem tackled?

The 160-acre farm was already in the process of moving away from maize production. This intensive, monocultural crop can create significant issues with soil compaction. “In some fields you couldn’t drive a spade into it, and when we ploughed to return the fields to pasture, some clods of soil came up as really sizeable, solid blocks with deep dry cracks between them. Considering the rainfall we were getting, hardly any moisture was making its way down into the soil,” Sam recalls.

The Elwy is a powerful river which, when in full flow ,tears at the banks during heavy rainfall. It's like a current with the power of a machine, sweeping away everything in its path.

Sam Kenyon

Additionally, river erosion and higher-than-average rainfall meant land was lost from the maize fields every year. “You could see the edges being eaten away and the top washing off each winter – it was the opposite to being sustainable,” Sam says.

Sam turned to Natural Resources Wales (NRW), which explained that the steep sides of the river banks were a major part of the problem. In some areas, the river was eroding so much land from the banks that they were becoming concave in shape. Eventually, the edges of the fields would topple into the water and be washed away.

To address this issue, NRW advised making the bank’s gradient gentler. This would allow the water to flow up the slope more slowly, taking the erosive energy out of it. Where possible the flood water could then sit on Sam’s fields, where it could be absorbed into the soil provided the compaction was addressed. It meant taking field edges out of production but if it saved the field washing away bit by bit each year, Sam decided it was worth trying.

NRW also recommended burying coppiced willow trunks horizontally into the bank. These would regenerate, acting as root balls that were buried just deep enough not to be washed away, with the regrowth helping to hold the land together.

Did it work?

While the project hasn’t been without its challenges, Sam says the remodelled bank is a significant improvement and the measure has clearly proven its effectiveness. “It hasn’t worked perfectly everywhere, but that’s because we haven’t scraped the bank back to a gentle enough slope. It has been a learning curve,” she says.  “At times, we also need to account for the Elwy being a mobile river, allowing it to meander in order to disperse energy away from properties.

“However, the works have really helped to reduce the erosion. Learning how to dissipate the energy in different areas, and allowing gravel and silt to settle, has essentially saved our riverbanks where we’ve been able to afford to carry works out. But just when I think I have the hang of it, the river shows me otherwise! That’s when I need to learn quickly or seek advice from a geomorphologist again.”

Other changes Sam has made to the farm have also had a major impact. She replaced the maize with livestock and herbal ley pasture. In 2020, she introduced rotational grazing for her livestock, allowing the grass to rest longer between grazing periods. This has already addressed the compaction issue well and she can see that, when it rains now, the water behaves differently when it falls on the farm or in the surrounding area.

“Water used to just pool on top of the stubble fields, barely soaking in at all,” Sam explains. “Now, with much higher infiltration rates, we hardly see a puddle. It wasn’t instant, but I was surprised how much things changed within the first three years. Now, we only get puddling during flash floods, whereas before, we would see it every time it rained and throughout most of the winter.”

Sam now hopes to extend the riverbank alterations along the entire two-kilometre stretch of the Elwy that runs through her farm. “Who wouldn’t want to to save their soil and create cleaner water at the same time?” she wonders. However, she acknowledges this is a major undertaking both financially and due to the heavy machinery use and labour involved.

Letting nature do the work for free

Sam admits she would love to further explore natural flood management by creating scrapes and re-wiggling a ditch fed by streams in a woodland. Introducing a beaver enclosure to her farm has floated through her mind and she believes this would also create valuable wetland habitat for wildlife and her grazing livestock, while also improving water quality.

“From experience, beavers are nature’s engineers and they would be far cheaper and quicker at delivering the solutions to slow the flow that society and biodiversity desperately needs,” she says. “However, we’d need licencing in place to relocate any animals that choose the wrong spot.”

Unfortunately, with the town of St Asaph just a couple of miles downstream having invested £3m in flood defences, she recognises that having beavers at Glanllyn is far too risky an idea to pursue.

“This just isn’t the farm for trying it out, being so close to a town,” she says.

The works have helped so much to reduce erosion. Learning how to take the energy out of the river in places, and allowing gravel and silt to drop, has essentially saved our riverbanks where we've been able to afford to carry works out.

Sam Kenyon

Sam does feel the frustration of knowing that carefully-managed natural solutions, tried and tested across parts of the UK and Europe, already exist to tackle these problems.

“Beavers can do so many things to help in areas where we’re lacking, including holding back water so we can weather our way through drought periods better,” she says. “And to be honest, I was surprised by how small the beaver dams were when I saw them on a trip to Bavaria.

“With proper management and with water companies and authorities working together with beaver consultants and farmers, everyone involved could benefit. We could improve our soil health and solve flooding issues for local communities, while also helping to reverse the declines of so many smaller species which rely on our degraded freshwater environment.”