A community-led Farming in Protected Landscapes-funded project in the north-west of the Yorkshire Dales National Park has turned local sheep farmers into passionate advocates for planting hedgerows and small woodlands.

When retired project director Drew Woodward set out in 2018 to make his home parish of Crosby Ravensworth much more wooded, local farmers were “a bit suspicious”.

Now he says farmers are knocking on his door asking for the assistance of the organisation he chairs, the 50-member volunteer-run Crosby Ravensworth Parish Tree Group.

This year the Tree Group has secured Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) grants of £10,883 to further increase the resilience of local farmland through tree planting and hedgerow creation, which will take the total support from FiPL since 2021 to nearly £96,000. The grants are paid directly to farmers, who then reimburse the Tree Group.

Matt Jenkinson of Woodfoot Farm in Crosby Ravensworth met Drew Woodward last month (see picture) to assess half a kilometre of hedgerow planted by the Tree Group four years ago.

Mr Jenkinson said grass growth and sheep were benefiting: “We’ve had five projects done and number six is in the pipeline. It really is working hand in hand with agriculture. This area [we are standing in], before it was done, there was very little shelter. At the end of March, early April, if an east wind kicks in it really does knock things back and we’ve seen that this hedgerow has offered a heck of a lot more shelter. Stock are doing better because of it.

“This part of the farm is an area split into two productive meadows that we take two cuts a year off. And then a pasture. Before, the boundaries were single line fencing. It was an aging fence and we would get lambs getting through and mixed up. Now we’ve got the advantage of two solid boundaries and a hedge between and we’re getting very few mix ups – and stock can thrive.

“What we’re trying to do is break field parcels down a bit more. We’re seeing better grass growth because of that and from a farming point of view we’re utilising the green stuff that comes out the ground better because the ewes manage that parcel better and utilise the whole area of the field rather than have a bigger field with two acres in the corner that the sheep don’t really go to.

“The parcel just over the wall there is the next project. We’re going to split it. They [the sheep] would always graze the bank but never the bit by the river, so we’re going to split the field so we can shut them on to the bank, manage that, then shut them on to the river, to manage that.

“And you can see the trees in crates there [field trees protected by wood posts and rails]. That was a particularly wet area of the field and slowly the trees are improving it and we’re getting better soil health and we can manage grazing a lot better.

“From my point of view I’m not having to fill out forms to get the grant, or do the planting work, or the claim forms. It gets done. It’s taken care of, by local folk who are invested in the area, working with local farmers, getting local funding. We’re all pulling together to improve our environment.

“We see the benefits: there’s more biodiversity knocking about, more birds. The hedges link things up. The fell is a SSSI [Site of Special Scientific Interest]. The Lyvennet running down the next gill there, that’s SSSI. Now we’ve got the connectivity, stitching it together.”

Mr Jenkinson added: “The other point is that we can put these hedgerows into schemes to get paid for laying them and maintenance through the Sustainable Farming Incentive, though it’s not a vast amount.”

Drew Woodward, the Chair of the Crosby Ravensworth Parish Tree Group, explained how the organisation began, and how attitudes to it have changed rapidly.

He said: “It started in 2018, as all good things do, with a beer in the Butcher’s Arms [in Crosby Ravensworth]. We’d been away on holiday in Scotland and were delayed by a storm. When we got back here there were a lot of mature trees down, which were being cut up and being used for firewood. There was a group of four of us bemoaning the fact that nobody ever replaces these trees, we just steadily get fewer trees in the landscape. That was the seed which grew the Tree Group, which has now planted precisely 6768 native trees, mostly in small plantations in corners of fields in areas farmers consider non-productive, on top of 7500m of hedging [at six trees per metre] – and we have more to do this coming season.

“When we first started knocking on doors, most of them wouldn’t know me and they would be a bit suspicious and would take a bit of persuading to allow us to plant trees on their land. The world has changed. Now I have people knocking on my door, wanting to know whether we can plant them a hedge or plant them a small woodland.

“Ultimately it’s all about funding of course, and FiPL has provided us with the funding, without which we wouldn’t have been able to do anything like as much as what we’ve done.”

Asked why he and others in the Tree Group had put in so much volunteer effort, Mr Woodward, who is 73, said: “Restoring and maintaining our landscape is important. It’s just doing the right thing.

“Most of us in the group will never see the trees into maturity, although the hedges are already starting to look good. It’s a fairly boring thing when you are planting a hedge. The species mix is that in every metre we have two rows of three trees and those six trees will consist of four hawthorn, one hazel, and one other. The other tends to be dogwood, dogrose or field maple. We get them from Thorpe Trees nursery near Wetherby.

“I’d be surprised if we weren’t still doing this in five years’ time. My real target is to get involved in laying the hedges that we planted in our early years, that would be very satisfying, and that could start from next year.”

The Crosby Ravensworth Parish Tree Group has planted trees on about 20 holdings since 2019, mostly for upland farmers but also on land owned by the Parish Council.

Mr Woodward was keen to acknowledge all the funders of the group.

He said: “The Farming in Protected Landscapes programme has been our biggest funder. We’ve received total grants of £145,961 in the first five years, of which £84,757 has come through FiPL. Our first grant was £10,000 from the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority’s Sustainable Development Fund; that got us kick started. We’ve also had grants from Eden District Council, the County Council, Westmorland and Furness Council. We’ve had money from Tesco, Yorkshire Dales Millenium Trust, and PBS International for carbon off-setting. It’s all been gratefully received.”

“A tree costs between about 60 pence and a pound, but you’ve then got to stop the tree being eaten by voles, rabbits, sheep and cattle so the protection of tubes and spirals and fencing and tree crates is where most of the money goes. We have a policy of using only plastic tree guards that have been used before, not new ones.”

FiPL is a grants programme for England’s Protected Landscapes, funded by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and administered in the Yorkshire Dales National Park by the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority.

Member Champion for Natural Environment at the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, Mark Corner, said: “The Farming in Protected Landscapes programme is making farm businesses in the Yorkshire Dales National Park more resilient, while conserving and enhancing the natural environment. The Crosby Ravensworth Tree Group, working on behalf of farmers, is a particularly inspiring case study of what the FiPL programme is achieving and the legacy it is creating.”