Completing a Hedgerow Assessment

For those in a Sustainable Farming Incentive agreement, you may have the task CHRW1: Assess and record hedgerow condition, ahead of you. Some of you might not be jumping for joy at the thought of it, but once you get started, you’ll see it’s actually quite rewarding! It’s a great reason to get out around your farm and explore all its nooks and crannies.

As the leaves start to fall, now is a great time to think about when to get out and take a look around. The hedgerow assessment is a fantastic way to understand and cosy up to your hedgerows. Even if you only skim the surface and complete a basic assessment, you’ll still be in a much better position than before. Assessments like these help to improve long-term hedgerow management, identify key areas where re-planting or gapping-up might be needed, and provide an overall diagnosis of the health and quality of these iconic boundary features.

The Healthy Hedgerows survey, which can be carried out on your phone or on paper, is a really good base to start with, and is SFI compatible. The template provides you with the opportunity to look at the general health of your hedgerows at a farm scale. The diagram below illustrates the different types of hedges you might find on your farm, using the Adams Hedgerow Management Scale. The ideal hedgerow types are shown in green — H5, H6 and H7.

When looking at a hedge for this survey, you assess:

• the hedge structure - entering the type of hedgerow from the Adams Hedgerow Management Scale
• average height
• average width
• number of trees
• total hedge gaps (in metres)
• canopy base height

The answers to these will provide you with a nicely detailed analysis of your hedgerow. The choice is yours if you would like to take the assessment one step further!

Whether you follow a guide for a hedgerow assessment is up to you. We recommend that for SFI compatibility you do the Healthy Hedgerows survey as a minimum, however, if you’re interested in learning more about your hedgerows, you can create your own or try a different survey, focusing on different aspects of the hedgerow such as tree and shrub species.

The Great British Hedgerow Survey provides a great base for a deeper analysis. It uses the same management scale but also provides a list of woody species to tick off within a 30m section. This survey also looks at the location of the hedgerow, asks if there are invasive non-native species within the hedgerow and if there is a feature such as a ditch or a wall bank present. Altogether, it’s a brilliant way to build a more comprehensive picture of the diversity, condition, and management needs of your hedgerows.

Completing a survey is more than a box ticking exercise for your SFI agreement. It’s an invaluable way to gain a deeper understanding of a key asset to both the farm and the local wildlife. By using the preset surveys available online, you can quickly and clearly gain detailed insights into hedge structure, diversity, and management needs. Looking past the compliance, hedgerows are vital to our landscape and host such a large variety of mammals, reptiles, insects and birds throughout the year, it’s definitely worth keeping a close eye on them!