19 April 2024

Following criticism of the Government’s new Farming Recovery Fund, which provides grants of between £500 and £25,000 to farmers impacted by Storm Henk, the requirement for eligible farms to be within 150 metres from main rivers has been removed. The original criteria had meant that some farms where up to 90% of land was saturated or underwater were not eligible to access the funding.   

New funding has been made available for farmers and landowners to improve rivers and lakes through nature-based solutions and innovative technologies. The money for the Water Restoration Fund is financed by water company fines, and will be distributed by the Department for Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Defra has also announced its River Wye Action Plan to protect and preserve the river and its surrounding areas. The river has been in headlines recently over pollution from nearby chicken farms, and the new £35 million fund sets out measures to protect it from further harm, which include promoting soil retention in nearby fields via new Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) actions.

Guardian readers have voted the common earthworm as the UK Invertebrate of the Year in a competition which put them up against species including bees and spiders. Readers nominated the earthworm to be a part of the shortlist, and took 38% of the vote in the final poll. This comes after the Guardian reported last week that UK earthworm populations have declined by a third in the past 25 years.

A new blog from Recipe for Change discuses how the overuse of sugar in the UK impacts our soil as much as it does our health. Coined ‘sugar pollution’, the oversupply of sugar has well documented consequences for public health, and currently up to 500,000 tonnes of UK topsoil is removed from fields with the sugar beet harvest. The article calls for supply-side measures to manage overproduction.

Researchers in California have undertaken a project to demonstrate the effectiveness of native shrubs in removing contamination from soil. The process of bioremediation uses plants, fungi and bacteria to clean soil, and the project demonstrated positive results. This process could replace the more common approach to removing contamination by simply taking it away and replacing it with uncontaminated soil.

Soil science experts in the US have cast doubt on the impact of the Department for Agriculture’s incentives for farmers to adopt practices which help store soil carbon. The scientists expressed concerns about tying these actions directly to offsetting due to the variety and uncertainty in results.

Experts have said that trillions of tonnes of carbon which is stored in the soil could have been left out of environmental models. A study by researchers in China has quantified global stock of soil inorganic carbon, demonstrating that the top two metres of soil holds about 2.3 trillion tonnes.