Land management advice
The core work of the New Forest Land Advice Service (NFLAS) involves providing advice to anyone who owns and/or manages land in the area, including:
Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINCs)
Within the geographical area covered by NFLAS there are approximately 550 Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINCs) covering 5,050 hectares.
Many are under managed, others are managed inappropriately and many people don’t even know they have one. Contact us if you’d like advice on your SINC.
Equine holdings
We can offer site visits to equine holdings to give advice on good practice management of grassland, manure, watercourses, hedgerows, trees and other environmental features around the holding.
We also work with the New Forest Equine Forum to run regular courses. Speakers include a vet, an equine nutritionist and two experts on paddock management.
For information to help you manage your paddock, see the ‘equine advice’ box to the right of this page.
Hedgerows
Hedgerows and other field boundary features in the countryside act as important habitats for wildlife and are often referred to as ‘corridors’ which have the ability to link fragmented wildlife sites together.
We offer visits to landowners and land managers who have hedgerows on their farms for which they would like management advice.
Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs)
In order to improve water quality in England, many areas have been designated Nitrate Vulnerable Zones because the watercourses in those areas are suffering from high inputs of nitrates, and often other pollutants too.
If you are a landowner or tenant in one of these areas of the Forest, you will have certain requirements that you need to meet.
Please get in touch with us if you would like any advice or support with this and we will come out and visit you and help you make sense of the legislation.
Defra advice on NVZs (external link)
Basic Payment Scheme and Cross Compliance
We able to help with paperwork relating to the Basic Payment Scheme, for example getting your land registered on the Rural Land Registry, filling in the scheme forms and keeping up to date with all the cross compliance records and rules you need to adhere to if you receive monies from the Single Payment Scheme or from Environmental Stewardship.
Ponds
If you would like advice on how to manage your pond or would like to help wetland wildlife by creating a new pond on your farmland, we would be interested in hearing from you. The type of pond we would be looking to help you create would be a scrape in the field and unfenced from livestock. It would be left to develop naturally, with no planting required.
