‘The wildlife that has come is phenomenal’: the UK farmers holding off floods the natural way

A beck on James Robinson’s farm in its current, wilder state, and with the banks fenced off from livestock. Photograph: James Robinson

The streams, or becks, that run through James Robinson’s Lake District farm used to be cleaned out regularly – with vegetation yanked out and riverbeds dredged, or even completely filled in.

“The becks on our farm have suffered from overmanagement. We’ve got these elevated becks on some of our farm as well as some that have been cleaned up and cleaned out – it’s been a bit rubbish for ecology and for flood management,” he says now.