Dry run: the wet farming experiment that could sow seeds for future crops

Cambridgeshire project trials plants that thrive in more extreme weather, including sphagnum moss and bulrushA road deeply rutted by tractors and trucks winds its way across the Fens in Cambridgeshire, a flat, expansive landscape where trees are the exception, not the rule, and ditches rather than hedges divide the fields. This is England's breadbasket, a huge food-producing region where the rich, dark soil nurtures potatoes, carrots, sugar beet and wheat.In among these intensively farmed fields are a handful of bare, black strips of land which are part of a unique trial to introduce paludiculture, or wet farming, to the UK. The Water Works project is testing new crops that could suit a future UK climate, when weather events are expected to be more extreme and rain arrives in a deluge. Using plants that thrive in saturated soil, it is setting out to show the commercial benefits of re-wetting these peatlands, a process that will also lock carbon into the ground. Continue reading...