Improving resilience: New reservoir at Sefter Farm!

Barfoots are delighted to have built our largest reservoir to date.

Water is a precious natural resource essential to growing our crops, however we often get water at the wrong time, or the wrong place and this is becoming increasingly the case with climate change.

To manage water efficiently we invest in water infrastructure, soil holding capacity (improving soil structure supports resilience to flooding and drought), and technology for precise water application. Reservoirs are part of our water infrastructure, they collect winter rainfall, storing it for when we need to irrigate.

Following last summer’s drought which was a very challenging period for our farm, to improve our resilience we invested in this additional storage which not only collects rain water, but is also fed by our water treatment plant which converts waste water from the factory into irrigation water.

Our biggest reservoir to date, it holds 125,000m3, and will irrigate our crops in the surrounding area including sweetcorn, courgettes and Tenderstem.

Later this year we will plant wildflowers and trees around the reservoir to further improve soil health and build biodiversity.