Ashford LPA

Haffenden Farm sits on the fault line between the Low and High Weald, where Tunbridge sandstone meets the richer clays to the north. Some of its fields carry three hundred years of clay quarrying beneath them. Its woods are ancient semi-natural woodland. 

The Hukins family has farmed here for five generations. Haffenden is one of only forty-four hop farms left in England, with its own brewery, a taproom and glamping. One field they have always called 109, named for the Messerschmitt that came down there in 1940. 

Twenty-five years ago, Ross's father Peter began stepping back from inputs-based farming, enrolling the land in Natural England stewardship schemes and a long programme of grassland restoration. Ross describes the farm beginning to breathe again. 

The BNG scheme extends that work. Approximately 70 hectares between Biddenden and St Michaels, near Tenterden, are being converted from modified grassland, degraded ditches and under-managed hedgerows into lowland meadow, species-rich hedgerow, traditional orchard and ancient woodland. The habitat is secured for thirty years through a Section 106 agreement and a conservation covenant. Adonis Blue Environmental Consultants are retained as ecologists, overseeing monitoring and management throughout. 

Ross is a trustee of Tenterden Wildlife, and the farm has been part of Project Turtledove, researching the turtle dove's habitat collapse. Swift boxes are already up across the site. The BNG scheme is the latest expression of a conservation commitment that runs back decades. 

Wild cattle on the meadows, beavers on the river, wild pigs in the woodland - all three species once native to this landscape. The intention is not to introduce them as a gesture. It is to let them carry the management work, doing what machinery currently does, in the way the land was managed before any of them were lost.