Swings between increasingly common droughts and extreme rainfall are creating chaos for growers. While both reduce the reliability of water for crop irrigation, heavy winter rain is also flooding low lying farmland – damaging produce, land and habitats.
West Pikefish Farm, situated in the UK South East’s Medway catchment, saw a win-win-win opportunity to turn this challenge into long-term resilience. Supported by the Water Roadmap’s Collective Action Project (CAP) in Medway, and in collaboration with the South East Rivers Trust (SERT), they are transforming a flood-prone orchard into a multifunctional wetland to restore habitats, protect downstream communities from excess flooding and store water for summer irrigation, which will protect crop yields and reduce supply chain disruption in the dry summer months.
Problem
Solution
Impact
Problem
West Pikefish Farm, run by the Smith family, has historically grown top fruit near the River Teise in South East England. They’re one of thousands of farmers navigating increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather conditions, with prolonged dry periods in the summer followed by intense winter rainfall.
A former orchard on the farm is vulnerable to regular flooding, offering little economic value for the family nor ecological value for nature. Heavy water runoff is also affecting downstream communities that face flood risk.
Solution
Supported by funding in the Collective Action Project and in collaboration with SERT, West Pikefish Farm is designing and building a nature-based floodplain mosaic on the orchard, filled with small wetlands and habitat features that slow, store and filter water. The mosaic is being built alongside a winter storage lagoon to capture rainwater that can be stored and used for crop irrigation in dry summer months, reducing future need for abstraction from the River Teise. The Environment Agency, Natural England, the Forestry Commission and the Internal Drainage Board are being consulted to ensure that the design is robust and compliant.
Impact
The restored floodplain is expected to replenish at least 17.35 million litres of water to the environment each year, while the winter lagoon will store 4,000 m³ of water for summer irrigation when crops need it most.
Habitat creation across the restored orchard is projected to deliver a 127% uplift in habitat units and a 75% increase in hedgerow units.
The combination of nature-based solutions will reduce the risk of flooding on downstream villages, demonstrating how food production and community resilience can go hand in hand.
As part of the Joined Up Landscapes project, which looks at how nature-based solutions can be used to adapt to climate change in the UK, the site is operating as a research and demonstration platform, contributing data and insights that strengthen the evidence base for scaling nature-based solutions on farms across the country. Demonstration sites like these are critical — not just for proving that nature-based solutions work, but for making the business case that they are worth investing in.
