St Osyth: A wet field left to nature

St Osyth farmer Guy Smith explains how he has created a wildlife haven in a part of his farm and invited students to carry out some ‘field work’.

This was taken in a wet corner of a field of wheat where we couldn’t drill last autumn because it was too wet and the drill got stuck. So we left it unfarmed and look what came up! I used it as an opportunity to invite some students from the neighbouring Tendring Enterprise Studio School to study some farming in the field. We talked about food production and conservation - they also did some maths to work out how many hectares of wheat I had and how many hectares of wild flowers.