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The World Needs More Beck Wiggling and Scrape Creation
Some UK farmers are doing just that—to everyone’s benefit
“…The becks [streams] on our farm have suffered from overmanagement. We’ve got these elevated becks on some of our farm as well as some that have been cleaned up and cleaned out – it’s been a bit rubbish for ecology and for flood management,” he says now.
His family had run the farm for generations, but Robinson was already rethinking the way that things had been done, and had taken the farm organic 20 years earlier. And as flooding started to hit the farm more frequently, he began to wonder if changes could be made to the landscape that could make it more resilient.
He started by making the area around the becks wilder, cleaning them up less, as well as making them larger so they held more water and protected the rest of the farm from floods. “What we’ve done is a bit of ‘beck wiggling’,” he says. “The beck initially went down in straight lines that have been straightened hundreds of years ago. But we’ve created scrapes [shallow pools] and created pond areas…”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/uk-farmers-holding-off-floods-the-natural-way
His family had run the farm for generations, but Robinson was already rethinking the way that things had been done, and had taken the farm organic 20 years earlier. And as flooding started to hit the farm more frequently, he began to wonder if changes could be made to the landscape that could make it more resilient.
He started by making the area around the becks wilder, cleaning them up less, as well as making them larger so they held more water and protected the rest of the farm from floods. “What we’ve done is a bit of ‘beck wiggling’,” he says. “The beck initially went down in straight lines that have been straightened hundreds of years ago. But we’ve created scrapes [shallow pools] and created pond areas…”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/uk-farmers-holding-off-floods-the-natural-way
We’ve already been doing this in America—though with larger scale (but less widespread) projects such as that now underway on the Klamath River…
https://www.americanrivers.org/2023/06/6-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-klamath-river-dam-removals/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20largest%20dam,Iron%20Gate%2C%20and%20JC%20Boyle.
…which is being guided by the success of the dam removal on the Elwha
https://www.nps.gov/olym/learn/nature/dam-removal.htm
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nb: the opening pix is from another river rewilding article https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2018/06/rewilding-londons-rivers/ as was unable to get the Guardian images to show on DU