Colouring and Counting... and lots of measuring..
The last two days have been spent helping to sort out the ELS (Entry Level Stewardship) application, after finally getting the correct maps with all of the farm on them from Natural England. This involved going round the farm checking trees, hedges, ditches etc and whether or not they are the right size, have the right species in them and what area or length they are. After that all of the environmental features of the farm (pretty much everything I'd just looked at) had to be recorded onto the Farm Environmental Record (FER) maps - so alot of colouring - and then the different options we wanted to use for the ELS application had to be chosen, the points they would gain added up, and finally these then had to be added to another map! So... more colouring and labelling!
I'm now pretty well pretty well informed on all the EB, EE, EF etc options available and the number of points they are worth, as well as where each option is located on the farm..
All that is left is to transfer all of the options we've chosen onto the final application form - any additional options/points we have included that are not needed to meet our ELS points target will be logged for the Campaign for the Farmed Environment - I'll write a blog post about this later in the week as its an important campaign and I won’t have much else to write about as I now have a week’s holiday (although being boring and not actually going anywhere).