Our Farms & The Hampshire Downs

The Hampshire Downs

The Hampshire Downs is an elevated, open, rolling chalk landscape. Its chalk aquifers feed clean water to chalk streams and rivers and drinking water to local communities. The river Test is nationally significant for its wildlife and fly fishing.

Being close to the ancient city of Winchester this area is one of the country’s oldest farmed landscapes with evidence of prehistoric settlements and remnants of old Romano-British field systems. In the Middle Ages the rolling chalk landscape was favoured for sheep pasture, which then gave way to mixed farming and today its light, versatile, soils are valued for their ability to grow cereals.

Chalk grassland, which once covered much of the area, is now found in fragments on thin soils and steep slopes. It is much valued for its unique variety of chalk-loving grasses, flowering plants, butterflies, and insects.

The ancient woodland of Harewood Forest and the Forest of Bere fall within the cluster boundary. Woods provide fuel and timber for local use as well as hurdles from its well-managed hazel coppice.

Our Farms

Our 40 members manage over 40,000 acres of the mid Hampshire Downs, a chalk downland landscape sandwiched between the South Downs National Park and the North Wessex Downs AONB.

We are a mix of arable, livestock and dairy farms including large estates and commercial farm businesses as well as smaller mixed farming enterprises. All our members recognise the need to embrace a more environmentally sound approach. There is strong participation in meetings and events to consider how to transition to and deliver environmental outcomes.

We care for a long stretch of the river Test SSSI and its tributaries, a significant area of woodland, and an increasing extent of fragmented chalk grassland. Members include the Leckford Estate (the Waitrose farm), Sparsholt College, the National Trust and the Hampshire County Council.

Our land includes downland grazing, arable fields, woodlands, and chalk river valleys. All of us are involved individually in environmental measures and most of us in government-funded stewardship schemes.

Our Projects

Our group is working with with the Wessex Rivers Trust, The Piscatorial Society and The Test & Itchen Association on several projects aimed to improve the ecological status of our rivers

River restoration

Uptake of Countryside Stewardship is strong across the group which in turn is leading to a significant increase in the proportion of hedgerows and field margins managed for nature.

Biodiversity in the farmed landscape

Following the example of others there is growing interest in linking fragments of chalk grassland between neighbouring farms, particularly on the steep scarp slopes of the downs.