Pasture Champions: Clare Hill and Silas Hedley-Lawrence, FAI Farms, Oxford 4/4

Frosty morning Frosty morning

Give us a general description of the biodiversity on your farm – essentially above ground but reference to below ground if relevant– both flora and fauna

Farm Habitats:
• Floodplain meadow
• SSSi flood plain meadow (species rich and very few left in UK)
• Flood plain meadow (non SSSi)
• SSSi ditches and fen
• Permanent pasture
• Woodland edge and hedgerows
• Silvopasture
• Scrub and wooded Areas
• River Thames and Seacourt Stream

Key Fields/Areas:
• Pixey and Yarnton
• Alisons and floodplain
• Flushes and Ditches Longfield/Hagley
• Wytham Woods edge
• Parkland and Lower Seeds South/North
• Seacourt and wooded river Edge (Arthurs, Binsey etc)
• Kings Lock, Twos, Burrows (Waders)

 

Meadows in the mist Meadows in the mist

Key Flora:
• 120+ species Pixey and Yarnton SSSi flood plain meadow
• Changes to the parkland
• Lower seeds south from moss to orchids and wildflowers with management alone
• Water Parsnip (Ditches)
• Cotton grass (Flushes)
• Red rattle / Marsh lousewort (Flushes)
• Southern Marsh Orchid (Arthurs)
• Orchids, wildflowers, herbs and wetland plants

Key Fauna:
• Cattle Egrets
• Butterfly studies – rare butterflies – purple hairstreak, brown hairstreak, small heaths
• Hares (newly arrived since implentation of adaptive multi paddock grazing)
• Barn Owls
• Bats
• Foxes
• Badgers
• Roe and muntjac deer
• Heron
• Geese and duck
• Curlew and teal

• Merlin
• Sparrowhawk
• Dragonflies and damsel flies

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