Create shade and shelter for livestock and crops

>> Paul Renison, Cannerheugh Farm: 

Hi, I'm Paul Renison and I live with my family here at Cannerheugh in Rennick in Cumbria. And we're on the edge of the North Pennines near Cross Fell. So, the main business here is sheep, we’re running about a thousand crossbred sheep at the moment but we're aiming to have a thousand white-faced sheep. We're in charge of our own destiny here which is really why we're doing this work with the Woodland Trust. One of the drawbacks of living on in the North Pennines here especially in this area is the helm wind, which is an easterly wind, and it's pretty unforgiving so something that we're trying to work with the Woodland Trust. Trying to plant some trees and produce some more shelterbelts.  

The main sort of theory is that we're going to have more live lambs at the end of the day to sell, so it's more profitable. The other thing that the trees are going to give us is deep roots, which is going to help with the water infiltration in a very wet period of the winter. So, that will hopefully have benefits lower down the hill.  

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Primarily we're an outdoor lambing flock and that's what we're going to move to be 100% outdoor lambing with the help of these shelterbelts were going to hopefully increase our lambing percentage.  Once the lambs are on the ground up and running and marked, we then move into a rotational system and this again it helps that because instead of having a sheep just set stopped, we can now rotate them around each paddock and keep on top of the grass.  It's a challenging way of life but hopefully, it's a place where the kids can grow up and be run around free and somewhere that they can hopefully take on in the future. The trees just helped to frame the landscape in a way and help with the wildlife. So, if we can't work with the wildlife, it's a bad job.