Urgent Appeal: Restore & Connect Hoathly Farm

Kent Wildlife Trust manage over 85 reserves across the county, across a huge range of habitats including ancient woodland, heathlands, chalk meadows, salt marsh and wetland areas. Each reserve has its own management plan, which itself can vary depending on the species needs and pressures of the site. Most reserves respond best to a natural approach, where we look to put in place the natural processes for managing the area that have been lost and, in many cases, this means wilding grazing.  

Kent Wildlife Trust have over 800 animals who help us to manage our reserves for wildlife, including a wide range of cattle, sheep, goats, ponies and pigs. Each species and each breed have their own characteristics that make them specialists for certain habitats and Kent Wildlife Trust has decades of experience to enable us to know when and where to use them to make the best of their skills. 

 When these key components are put back into an ecosystem, the natural processes help to improve them for wildlife. Where additional management is needed, our amazing volunteers will step in and carry out the physical management of the reserves to complement the work carried ut by the livestock. 

Kent Wildlife Trust understands, and shares, concerns around food security. This is why we work with Farmer Clusters across the county to help facilitate local farmers taking action together. Our Farmer Clusters offer the chance for farmers to trial new methods of improving their land, and importantly to share learnings among their peers. Some farmers in the Clusters choose one focus to apply their efforts, such as the restoration of Turtle Dove habitat in Marden.  

Hoathly Farm is classified as Grade III arable land. Following many years of intensive farming, the clay soils in this area can lose nutrients, and become impacted which makes yielding viable crops difficult. The restoration of these parcels of land, which sit within a wider landscape of farmland, will help to restore an abundance of wildlife to the area. By encouraging biodiversity, and creating resilience within the landscape, this project will have benefits which are felt far beyond its borders. 

Once we have secured the land, we will gradually allow the land to regenerate using a small herd of old English cattle and potentially a small drove of pigs. These Wilder Grazing animals will help to manage the land in more natural way and can create much more diversity in the land than can be achieved via human led management.  

As the land regenerates more species will naturally return. Yellowhammers, Nightingales, Turtle Doves and Dormice are just a few who should call this landscape home but have been pushed to the brink due to eroding woodland and hedgerows.  

In the longer term, this landscape may be considered as part of the Southeast Pine Marten Reintroduction programme. 

This project will ensure that the land is returned to nature, creating a dynamic nature reserve where wood pastures, species-rich meadows, woodlands and hedgerows will replace land that has been intensively farmed for decades. 

Intensively managed farmland is rarely beneficial for wildlife. It will often involve the use of chemicals, farm the full breadth of the fields and generally create an environment that can be very hostile toward wildlife. By replanting hedgerows and allowing them to grow out into the fields, by managing the woodland s to diversify the age and species structure, by transforming the arable fields into scrub and meadows we will create habitats that are desired and required by wildlife, not habitats where wildlife is hanging on by their beak tips. 

There are public rights of way throughout the land which will be retained, and improvements will be made to ensure that the community benefits from connecting with nature on their doorstep. We hope to transform the sparce landscape into a nature reserve where people can discover new species, spot yellowhammer and hear nightingales when they visit.  

If we don’t raise the funds needed to purchase all of the land, we may still be able to save some. However, should another buyer secure the land first, we will be unable to improve its future but will try to connect with the new owner to offer collaborative advice on managing the land in a nature-positive way.   

If we are unable to buy either plot, the generously donated funds will still be put towards improving the landscape in the local area or put towards the purchase of another parcel of land that could support nature's recovery. Any action taken with money raised as a result of this appeal will go towards helping to achieve the aims of the Wilder Kent 2030 strategy.