Twenty metres of hedge, laid by hand, counted every year.
The smallest unit of nature this farm can honestly sell, and the one with the most measurable outcome attached to it. Not a symbolic acre of somewhere you will never see — twenty metres of a specific hedge on a specific bridleway, with a species count taken every February.
Why hedgerow metres rather than carbon.
Because a hedge is countable. You can walk twenty metres of it with a clipboard and record how many woody species are in it, how tall it is, how wide the base is, how many gaps there are, and what nests in it. Those numbers move year to year, and they move because of things somebody did.
A tonne of soil carbon is none of those things. It is modelled, it is contested, it is reversible by one wet autumn and a plough, and the measurement error on it is frequently larger than the claim.
So this page sells hedge metres and soil-health plots, at a scale small enough that the outcome can be photographed. The carbon argument gets its own page, and it is not a flattering one.
What twenty metres actually gets, and gets done to it.
The work
- Laying
- By hand, in the Midland bullock style, on a fifteen-year cycle
- Cutting
- Every third year at most, and never between March and August
- Gapping up
- Hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple, hazel, dogwood, holly
- Base width
- Managed towards two metres, which is where the nesting happens
- Margin
- A two-metre uncultivated strip either side, out of production
What gets measured
- Woody species count
- Per thirty-metre stretch, every February
- Height and width
- Measured, not estimated, at five fixed points
- Gaps
- Total gap length as a percentage of the stretch
- Nesting
- Recorded during the breeding season by a volunteer surveyor
- Blackberry yield
- Weighed, because it becomes your jam
What you receive
- Four jars of blackberry jam
- From your own stretch, made in the farm kitchen
- The annual survey
- The actual numbers, including the years they go backwards
- Photographs
- Winter after laying, and August in leaf
- Price
- £90, fixed, for one year
- Cash return
- None. This is not a credit and cannot be traded
Hedgerow adoption is a forward purchase of jam and a survey report. It is not a biodiversity credit, it is not sold to anybody as an offset, and it cannot be used by anybody to claim they have offset anything.
What the counts have actually done.
| Stretch | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bridleway, D2 | 4 species | 4 | 6 | 6 | Gapped up in 2024 with two species that took |
| Bridleway, D3 | 3 species | 5 | 6 | 6 | Same operation, better ground |
| Track side, D1 | 5 species | 5 | 5 | 4 | Lost a dogwood to a flail in 2025. Our fault, recorded as such |
| Margin height, mean | 1.8m | 2.1m | 2.4m | 2.6m | Cut once in four years instead of annually |
| Gap length, D1–D3 | 18% | 14% | 9% | 7% | Three winters of planting |
| Nesting records | 6 | 9 | 11 | 14 | Yellowhammer, whitethroat, dunnock, wren |
The economics nobody expects.
Unfarming pays better than farming on the worst ground here, and it is not close. A quarter acre of the Brash Tops growing spring barley in a dry year loses money once the inputs are counted properly. The same quarter acre in an agri-environment option does not.
Hedgerow is the extreme version. Twenty metres of properly laid hedge costs real money in labour and returns scheme income, blackberries, and a measurable improvement in the thing everybody says they want farms to produce.
The uncomfortable part is that this makes hedge adoption a good product for reasons that have nothing to do with the adopter. We would be laying it anyway. What the ninety pounds buys is the counting, the jam, and the fact that somebody is watching.
- 20m
- the unit
- £90
- for a year
- 6
- woody species in D2
The other nature units.
Take a stretch.
Three twenty-metre stretches on the grid, one of them already gone.
