The Grower Ltd – Human Beaver Project

The Grower specialises in growing and supplying trees and hedging through regenerative farming practices and is a pioneer of environmental diversification within a traditional farm model. To date, The Grower has sold 1,750,000 trees across the UK from the Lizard to Loch Lomond in Scotland! They’ve been a part of planting over 65,500 trees across Cornwall and the South West as part of their innovative ‘turn key’ solution to the supply and planting of trees, and they’ve planted 5,600 trees on their own farm alone as part of their commitment to nature recovery.  
 
The Grower has been working with FiPL to improve agricultural runoff onto Chapel Porth by installing leaky dams. Leaky dams are a form of Natural Flood Management (NFM), whereby natural, woody materials, are laid across water channels creating ‘leaky’ barriers. This allows ‘normal’ flows of water to pass through, but slows the flow when there watercourses are ‘in flood’.  

Runoff is an important topic in Section 5, linking well to Cornwall Councils Connect the Red River Project.  During the unprecedented rainfall in 2023, The Grower saw areas of the farm flood that had never flooded before and this acted as a ‘wake up call’ to be pro-active and mitigate for any future rainfall events.  
 
As such, The Grower approached FiPL for funding to achieve their ambition of reducing the speed of flow under heavy rainfall and providing sediment the opportunity to drop and settle before reaching the sea.  

The Grower used this opportunity to expand their community outreach programme by hosting two community days to install the leaky dams. The first community day had a focus around Green Careers, and welcomed school leavers and college students onto the site, whilst the second community day was focused on nature and mental wellbeing. 

During the two community days, people learnt how to prune back overgrown blackthorn and hawthorn trees, how to prepare the woody materials for dam building and how (and where) to erect the dams along the watercourse. Of course, the hard working community then got together over a great lunch provided by the canteen in Mount Hawke to talk about all that they had learnt.  

As a side note, and not FiPL funded, The Grower also host the only tubex recylcing centre in Cornwall, making it easier than ever to dispose of tree shelters for Recyling (for free!)