OAKBANK NEWS AND BLOG

As many of you will know, we have been pushing the benefits of Miscanthus for game cover for a number of years, and this year, more than ever, miscanthus has proved a saviour for many shoots. There is now an opportunity to grow this crop as an alternative cash crop, as we have teamed up with ESG Natural Capital to offer long-term, lucrative contracts to grow this sustainable, carbon sequestering, low-input crop. We are looking for growers from across the UK although, due to h

The government's 25-year roadmap puts soil, habitat and farm wildlife at the heart of food production. We'd urge every land manager to read carefully how it intends to pay for all this, because the smart money may be on acting now. Yesterday (24th June), Defra published Farming Roadmap 2050: Growing England's Future, alongside its response to Baroness Batters' Farming Profitability Review. For those of us who have spent our careers arguing that productive farming and a recove

On 15 April 2026, Defra published responses to two parallel Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) consultations and opened a third on an additional targeted exemption for brownfield residential development. Together, the responses confirm when major infrastructure projects will start drawing on the off-site biodiversity unit market, exempt around half of the smallest residential sites, and broaden the geography in which a land parcel can supply units to a development. What has been con

Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRSs) are spatial plans, stemming from the Environment Act 2021, to drive habitat restoration, nature-based solutions and environmental improvements across England. With nature in decline (e.g. species studied across the UK have declined on average by 19% since 1970) and in the context of national targets for reversing this decline, LNRSs should provide locally led roadmaps showing where best outcomes (i.e. most needed and most likely to su