Beavers / Re-introduction / Farming with Nature

We had a lovely meeting with Chris on our Oxford Real Farming podcast and decided then to have a longer follow up chat with him - and here it is. Because we are geographically about as far apart as we can be in England this chat was over TEAMS... the joys of modern comms! Chris is very much the farmer but as you'll hear in this conversation he absolutely sees the value in and of farming with nature. He has brought back those amazing eco engineers, beavers, to his Cornwall farm and clearly loves it! Please take a listen.

Lentils / Dal / Protein / Legumes / Climate positive Agriculture

Welcome to a delicious edition of Tree Amble! In July we headed off to the second annual Dal festival on Wakelyns Farm in Suffolk. David and his team, with support from Hodmedods, started growing lentils in their agroforestry system in 2023 and held their first Dal celebration in 2023. We joined them to celebrate the second festival and on the way got to talk Dal with 5 chefs creating dishes fom India, Africa and Afghanistan as well and climate and diet with some of the 150 people attending. We hope this edition gets the taste buds going!

Rivers / River Restoration / Habitat Creation / Fish / Climate Change

In this episode of Tree Amble, the first of Series 4, we meet George Heritage who has made a career out of understanding rivers and now works to restore them for biodiversity and water management and we go out to the riverside with a team from West Cumbria Rivers Trust and volunteers to monitor a stretch of river for its fish population. Jonny and Ruth use a method call "eclectro fishing" to count fish of all sizes in a stretch of river and then, through repeat surveys see how fish populations change over time and over the catchment. They can easily see the effect of poor habitat or pollution incidents and then work to change it with farmers and land owners.

In other words this one is all about rivers and what we can do to help restore and revitalise them. Have a listen!