Brodoclea with Site Assistant David Carruth, Winner of the Young People's Award for Farm Woodland
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 I'm David, I'm the site assistant here and welcome to Brodick Lea.
00:04 We are a small 430 acre site. We're quite high up here in the hills.
00:17 This is one of the largest wilderness areas in the central belt of Scotland.
00:22 I suppose what makes this special to me is that my family have farmed in this region for a couple of hundred years.
00:29 So on this site we rotationally mob graze mangalitsa pigs.
00:33 As you see they have these thick coats around them which means that they're very well established and well protected.
00:41 You get lots of seeds and lots of things sort of mixed up in the wool and as it sheds off we're seeing species move from parts of the site to different parts of the site.
00:51 I always think that if I was a pig and I was to design my dream house that this would be it.
00:58 So this is one of the areas where we purposely don't graze the pigs to provide just a different habitat and cater to species of ground nesting birds.
01:07 We have wind chats that come at Brodick Lea funnily enough and arrive flying all the way from Africa just to be here.
01:14 So quite a few of the species on site are red or yellow listed.
01:18 What's sort of important about Brodick Lea is it's sort of isolated, it's a bit of an oasis.
01:25 We do have these areas of mature woodland just sort of dotted around the site which is great.
01:31 It means that we've got woodland at different stages.
01:34 Having areas that are maturing at different paces is a really important thing.
01:39 It means we've got areas that are developing into different levels of succession at different times.
01:44 Some of the oldest platen on site is around, come up for 11 years old now.
01:49 Different species of tree on site.
01:51 Well first of all we've got our oak, sessile oak, silver birch and downy birch, hazel, rowan, alder, poplar, aspen, hawthorn, blackthorn, loads of trees.
02:03 So in the sunnier seasons we start to see different species of wildflower come on to site.
02:11 We've started to see a few come in already.
02:13 In the areas where the pigs are disrupting the land it creates perfect habitat for wildflowers to flourish.
02:18 So to make sure we're doing the right thing here it's important to monitor the land.
02:23 Last year we had a bird survey.
02:25 In the future we're going to be doing more wildlife surveying on site and try to bring in more sort of community based work as well.
02:34 We want people to get up onto the hillside on nicer days than this one today.
02:39 We're replacing some of the gates and putting in community access gates so people can walk right through the middle of our woodland.
02:46 Over and above that we're hoping to start site tours so that local community groups can access the site and really get to learn about agroforestry, silvopasture, biodiversity enhancement and woodland creation.
03:01 At the Future Forest Company we offer tree planting and biodiversity sponsorships.
03:10 Businesses can sponsor the work that we're doing here and come to the site and see the impact first hand.
03:17 [Music]
03:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]