UK Farmers Turn to Beavers and Drought Crops to Beat Drought
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- Martin Lines is improving soil health and installing rainwater harvesting systems on his south Cambridgeshire farm to retain moisture, while advocating for smarter river flow management through digital sensors.
- West Pikefish Farm, led by James Smith in Kent, is transforming a flood-prone orchard into a wetland system with ponds and a 4 million-litre lagoon to store water for summer irrigation and reduce downstream flood risk.
- Chris Jones in Cornwall relies on a family of beavers within an enclosure to build a 3 million-litre reservoir that sustains pasture during droughts, calling them the 'most useful and cheapest way' to store water.
- Farmers in Cumbria are adding extra guttering and large water butts to collect winter roof runoff for use in dry periods, supported by Wrap’s water resilience initiatives.
- Katie Cross at Wrap emphasizes combining nature-based solutions like tree planting and cover crops with infrastructure such as storage tanks to improve farm-level drought resilience.
- Pete Iannetta at the James Hutton Institute notes legumes occupy just 5% of UK cropped land and advocates expanding cultivation of heat-tolerant crops like chickpeas and soya beans to boost food security.
Why it matters: With the UK experiencing its driest July in 190 years and crops failing due to drought, these on-farm adaptations represent a shift toward self-reliance in water and crop management—reducing dependence on costly reservoirs and imported vegetables while increasing long-term resilience at measurable scales (e.g., 3–4 million-litre storage per site).
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