Giving Nature a Home on our Farms

Supporting a sustainable future for the environment, our community and our business is important to everyone who works at Bernard Matthews. In addition to maintaining and protecting our environment to support the best of British farming, our staff also like to go that extra green mile.

In 2014 the company’s agricultural team came up with a list of five key initiatives and asked each farm manager to choose three to start implementing. The options were building a dead hedge, a barrier constructed from cut branches; creating a dead wood habitat of decaying wood and old plants; constructing nest boxes for small song birds to roost or nest; building a bug boxes and creating wildflower patches.Brian Watts at River Farm in Great Witchingham, Norfolk, installed a dead hedge on his farm to attract larva, beetles, song birds and small native mammals and also built several song bird boxes and planted a two square metre area for wildflowers to grow.The success of this project, along with several other green initiatives on Mr Watts’s farm, including the installation of biomass boilers to replace fossil fuel use and the implementation of new drinkers to conserve water, earned him a place in the finals of a Marks and Spencer Farming for the Future Award.We also like to get local school children involved with the various biodiversity activities on our farms. In 2014 we enlisted the help of 35 pupils from Holton St Peter Primary School in a competition to decorate over twenty bird, bat and hedgehog boxes that were positioned within the company’s 55 acre solar farm site at Holton in Suffolk. Who could resist making a home in these?