It looks like nothing more than a few soggy acres of bulrush, brown and broken, edged by a striding line of electricity pylons. But this modest patch of reeds and weeds is at the forefront of a novel farming method that upends ideas about how to manage some of our wettest landscapes.
For centuries people have worked to drain the Somerset Levels, transforming what was once a seasonal, shifting inland sea of islands, bogs and lakes into fertile pasture crossed by an intricate network of ditches, drains, rivers and rhynes. As usual in winter, December’s rain swept sheets of water across the lowest ground, leaving hedges and tracks sketched in broken lines on fallen sky.
In the past, efforts were largely concentrated on drying the peat to make it fit for agriculture, which had the side-effect of releasing significant amounts of carbon dioxide. Now, a small group of farmers think they have found a way to work with the wettest areas by cultivating a plant that’s already endemic here and thrives in saturated conditions.
Paludiculture, literally “marsh growth”, is the art of growing crops including reeds, sphagnum moss and sedges on swampy ground. Typha latifolia, reedmace or bulrush (cattail in the US), is the species being trialled here. “Two years ago, this was bare, just black desert,” explains the farmer Will Barnard, gesturing across the field, blurred behind persistent drizzle. “I seeded it with bulrush, a new technique, and harvested the tops last autumn. It’s a perennial, so it will grow again this spring.”
We seek shelter in a converted cowshed where the processed seedheads are stored. They have been stripped of their waterproof, waxy outer coating before being left to dry in specialist wooden crates from a Cornish daffodil-bulb producer.
Will throws back a tarpaulin; even on this damp day, gossamer strands lift and dance in the air. Each sausage-shaped head can explode to more than 200 times its size, producing downy fluff ideal for insulating clothing. The harvest is destined for Ponda, a biomaterials company based up the road in Bristol, who will process it into a pillowy fibre called BioPuff for lining jackets.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
