HEALTHY watercourses depend on biodiverse, productive agricultural land while helping to sustain profitable farm businesses writes Ribble Rivers Trust Chief Executive Jack Spees.

CREATING healthier rivers through practical action is the core purpose of Ribble Rivers Trust, but often people don’t understand the connection between our work and the land. Rivers and land are intrinsically linked – all the water in our rivers has flowed over and/or through land.

So understanding and tackling the root causes of problems we want to address in order to improve rivers invariably involves land. Farming is often blamed for many of the ills of our rivers and streams. At Ribble Rivers Trust we prefer to see it as holding the solution to many of our water quality and habitat needs.

Our rivers, streams and biodiversity as a whole need a mosaic of habitats, and many of these will be farmed habitats. If these are farmed well from a business perspective, they will be good for water quality. For example, fields with good soil structure and the right nutrient levels will ensure that the water percolating off them is good, whilst minimising nutrient costs to farmers and ensuring maximum growth of the ‘crops’.

There are sites where we would prefer habitat that isn’t of the farmed variety, but generally these places are likely to be the least productive or can be integrated effectively into the farming system. An example would be hedges, crossing flow paths to slow the flow (ensuring sediment and nutrient is deposited in fields rather than streams) whilst providing habitat and enabling more effective stock management and grazing regimes.

Getting our water quality and habitat needs right can also help us to achieve the right water quantity. Although there is a focus on ‘slowing the flow’ with regard to flood risk, we are also experiencing the other extremes of droughts and very, very low flows in our rivers. Most of the actions that help to address flooding also help to address drought issues. Slowing the flow can also ensure a gradual and more continuous release of water to our streams.

So what are the kinds of actions we are talking about? Well, funnily enough, they involve farmers and farming again, as they are almost identical to what we need for better water quality. For example, improving soil structure gives us one of the largest water storage locations possible – soil.

The other actions include peat moorland restoration and creating ponds and wetlands to hold and slowly release water, leaky dams (to do the same) within river channels and woodlands to roughen the surface of the land and increase water infiltration into soils. This also helps to improve the habitat quality of our rivers, for example by providing shade to keep water cool as well as trailing branches and roots from the trees. We also seek to reconnect rivers and their flood plains, ensuring that water can spread out naturally and return to the river slowly, rather than rush off in a large peak downstream. All of these actions can be carefully integrated into farming systems to ensure they are complimentary, or at least supporting farm business sustainability.

One of our more nuanced activities is the re-meandering of historically straightened rivers and streams. This lengthens their paths, increasing the time it takes for flood peaks to travel downstream and creating additional habitat. Often farmers feel that this involves loss of land but straightened rivers that are not in their natural locations can cause excessive erosion and deposition of gravels on valuable farmland.

The importance of agriculture to improving the health of our rivers and streams cannot be understated. To this end, at Ribble Rivers Trust we employ four farm advisors, who are the sons and daughters of farming families and currently farming themselves, so they think and speak farming. This makes them uniquely able to provide the support and advice needed by fellow farmers on what can be done to help their businesses and the water environment, with a particular focus on the whole of the Yorkshire Ribble.

You might rightly wonder how we focus our work, particularly as there is so much to do. Through monitoring, including citizen science combined with innovative and ground-breaking geographical information systems, we can model and map the locations where our actions can have the greatest benefits to the environment and people by identifying where they are most needed and where they can do the most good.

Find out more at: www.ribbletrust.org.uk This article first appeared in the members magazine of Gargrave based charity Friends of the Dales. Find out more at: https://friendsofthedales.org.uk/