Historic harvest underway for boggy bulrush trial in Manchester

Last week saw the first bulrush harvest for The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside’s pioneering wetter farming trial site on a farm on Chat Moss.

The first harvest of typha (bulrush) seed heads has happened on Steve Denneny's farm in Greater Manchester, following two years of work to establish the wetter farming site,  and initially seeding the field by drone in 2024.

Other trial sites across Europe have harvested bulrushes by hand, however this site is one of only two in the UK utilising specialised machinery for the first time – with this trial using the farmers digger, adapted with a reed cutting bucket on the end.

The bulrush heads will be used to manufacture innovative eco-friendly padded jackets called Biopuff®, replacing the need for goose down and polyester filling, created by materials science company Ponda®.

Chat Moss, where the trial is based, was originally part of one of the largest expanses of lowland raised peat bog in the UK but was drained and converted to farmland over 100 years ago. The trial field was increasingly waterlogged and proving almost impossible to get a traditional crop of cereals, potatoes or vegetables from.

As well as many of these areas of lowland drained agricultural peat becoming progressively unsuitable for a lot of crop growing, draining the peatland releases stored carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate emergency, as well as destroying habitat for a lot of special peatland species.

Bulrushes, otherwise known as typha, are the perfect crop to plant on boggy land. They’re often found growing naturally along the edge of ponds and other wet areas, so don’t struggle in the wetter conditions like other conventional farming crops do.

There’s still plenty of learning to do – the farmer has already been making modifications to the digger bucket to make sure that the bulrush seed heads fall into it rather than on the ground, and the more they harvest, the more learning and modifying will be done.

Steve Denneny who farms the land which is owned by Peel L&P said: “It’s been really exciting seeing the harvest today after all the work that’s gone into getting here. There's still more learning to do but it’s a great start”

It is hoped that by using machinery to harvest the crop, the time and manpower to process the bulrushes will be reduced, keeping the costs down for the farmer and customer.

The economic impact of wetter farming is another aspect being researched as part of the trial, making sure that wetter farming benefits the farmer – this includes looking into uses for the other parts of the bulrushes like stems and leaves to maximise the income and reduce waste, and whether the environmental impact of greenhouse gas reduction and biodiversity increase could unlock future government grants.

Mike Longden, Technical Lead for the project said: “The next steps for the project will be looking at increasing the trial from field scale to farm scale, as well as increasing the yield on existing wetter farming crops and continuing trialling the harvesting technique”

A harvesting demo was held at the farm with attendees from organisations including Natural England, the Environment Agency, Manchester Metropolitan University, Peel L&P, along with local farmers, with talks from Ponda and Lancashire Wildlife Trust as well as a Q&A with farmer Steve.

The project was initially awarded £400,000 from the Government’s Paludiculture Exploration Fund, administered by Natural England.