School of Sustainability

Filling in the ditches that drained a Finnish bog

The ditch is the problem. More than half of Finland's peatlands have historically been drained, cut through with channels that let the water out and left the peat to dry. At Isosuo, a raised bog in the municipality of Hartola in the Päijät-Häme region, the repair work is the exact reverse of the damage: find the ditches, and stop them up.

The work is led by PLUPS, a Finnish foundation whose name translates as the Foundation for Better Nature. Since 2024 its crews and volunteers have been blocking drainage channels with leaky dams and raising water levels with small earthworks, so that typical bog vegetation can return. The restoration area runs to between 180 and 300 hectares, and the foundation has been securing and legally protecting adjoining parcels so the rewetted ground joins up rather than sitting as islands.

The reason for bothering is the arithmetic. Peat covers about 3 per cent of the Earth's surface and holds more than 30 per cent of its soil carbon, over twice what all the world's forests contain. Drained, it oxidises and the store becomes a source. Rewetted, the bog goes back to holding water through floods and droughts, filtering what runs off it, and housing the waders, grouse and invertebrates that made Isosuo the region's most important peatland for birds. Camera traps are already watching.

What happens next is slower. PLUPS is considering low-intensity grazing with local cattle to keep meadow and mire open, and birdwatching and guided visits as ways the bog might pay its keep. Local volunteers built some of the dams with their own hands, which may matter as much as the hydrology: a bog repaired by its neighbours is less likely to be drained again.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source

Half the wheat, half as much again in profit

Somewhere in the farmland around Göttingen, there are winter wheat fields that have spent two years being watched. Researchers from the University of Göttingen and an international team walked nine landscapes, counting what grew and lived in them and totting up what each field earned. They were trying to answer a question that European farm policy currently answers with money in both directions: is it better to bolt a strip of wildflowers onto a conventional wheat field, or to farm the whole field organically?

The comparison was three-way. Conventional wheat with a wildflower strip along its edge; organic wheat with no strip; and conventional wheat with nothing done to it at all, as the control. The control matters: it is the plain field against which any gain is measured. Both options attract EU payments as environmentally friendly practices, so the choice is one real farmers face, on real forms, each year.

On the ecological side the two measures came out roughly level: both lifted biodiversity by 20 to 30 per cent against the plain conventional fields. On the economic side they parted company. The organic fields yielded only half as much grain — the figure that usually ends the conversation at the farm gate. But profits came in at one and a half times the conventional fields', once the lower yields were weighed against what organic wheat sells for and what the system costs to run.

The results were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. What they amount to is a quiet rebuke to the way these schemes are usually compared, which is by yield per hectare, as if a field were a factory floor. A field is a business and a habitat at once, and by those two measures together the field that changed everything came out ahead of the field that changed only its margins.

Regeneration International · Read the source

A Madrid mountain village keeps its sheep on foot

The shearing at Puebla de la Sierra does not start on time, and nobody minds. The slow morning leaves room for breakfast, for a go on Sergio's French carding machine, for improvising drop spindles out of dowelling rod and Marta's onions. Down by the stream, Juan García kneels in a knot of others, working a Rubia fleece into felt by hand. The day ends with music and dancing and food shared round; somewhere in it, roughly five hundred sheep and goats lose their wool.

This is the annual shearing festival of the Los Apisquillos Collective, formed twenty-six years ago in this village in La Sierra del Rincón, in the north-east of the Madrid mountains. The collective's flock is mostly Rubia de El Molar and Negra Castellana, two rare breeds native to the region. The animals give meat and dairy, but their other job is the land itself: grazing and trampling the mountain pasture and forest so it stays open. The collective exists to reinstate traditional rural practices and to stop the knowledge around them dying out.

The flock belongs to a much older arrangement. Spain's drove roads, the cañadas, were given official recognition by King Alfonso X in 1273, the same year the powerful shepherds' council of the Mesta was founded. For centuries after, shepherds walked their animals on foot between summer and winter grazing along what is now reckoned to be 125,000 kilometres of livestock trails. That seasonal movement, like the migration of wild herds elsewhere, shaped the landscape and maintained the ecosystems along the routes.

Most of that movement now happens in lorries. Depopulation, poor investment, cheap imports and physical obstructions have emptied the trails: scrub and forest have grown back spectacularly across Spain, and the cañadas that once worked as firebreaks have thickened into fuel. "Transhumance controls the overgrowth of scrubland", says Manuel Bahíllo of Trashumancia y Naturaleza, the organisation campaigning to keep the drove roads open as ecological corridors running the length of the peninsula. When the grazing stops, he argues, the biomass stays standing and waits for a spark.

So the woolly morning at Puebla is not nostalgia. The old routes carried livestock and cut firebreaks at once; now the hooves have gone and the fuel keeps accumulating. Javier, a farmer from Sanabria, puts it plainly: fires can be stopped, and a fire attacks more or less depending on the forest fuel it meets. García, Bahíllo, Sudlow and founder Álvaro are holding open a piece of working infrastructure, one flock and one festival at a time, on routes whose value is measured in what does not burn.

Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source

Twenty-one years of compost at the Bisley allotments

The idea came out of a meeting of allotment holders in 2004, the way these things usually do - somebody had more prunings than their own heap could swallow, and the parish had weeds going to waste. The following year, with a start-up grant from Gloucestershire County Council, the Bisley Community Composting Scheme opened on the Chestergate Allotments site, next to the community orchard. It was the first community composting scheme in the Stroud district. This August it turned twenty-one, which makes it the longest-running in the county.

The arrangement is simple. Members from the Bisley-with-Lypiatt parish bring their prunings, cuttings and weeds to the site, where the material is hot-composted, and in return they take away as much unsieved compost as they can use. It runs as a community interest company under a volunteer committee, with some paid labour alongside - an honest admission, after two decades, that goodwill alone does not turn heaps. The compost goes back onto members' gardens, returning nutrients to the same soil the material grew out of.

The birthday itself was run like an open day with the gate left open. Two of the scheme's directors, Lesley Greene and Liz Howlett, led tours of the composting and demonstration beds; both have been involved since the original allotment meeting. A new blacksmith-forged gate was formally opened in memory of Alan Evans, a founding director who was, unusually, both a composting expert and a world-renowned blacksmith - so the gate is his in two senses. Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust ran a bioblitz, setting seven moth traps around the site.

The traps came back with more than 170 species of moth identified in a single day, seven of them never previously recorded in Bisley. That is not a bad return for a site whose official business is rotting down cabbage stalks. The day finished with a bat walk, which is about where a composting scheme's twenty-first birthday ought to finish.

Garden Organic · Read the source