AHW5Nesting plots for lapwing

What it actually is

A fallow cultivated plot inside an arable crop. You cultivate it by early spring, manage it so it keeps enough bare ground for nesting birds, and keep it there until the crop around it is harvested and the bird nesting season has finished, which GOV.UK gives as typically late July. Nothing is drilled into it.

GOV.UK's stated aim is nesting sites for lapwing, and habitats for other declining farmland birds, farmland wildlife and important arable plants.

Where you already have lapwing plots, they can go into the action if they meet the requirements and are not receiving payment under another environmental scheme.

Source: GOV.UK, AHW5 action page, checked 04/08/2026.

What it pays, and what that comes to

The rate is in the panel at the top of this page. Multiplied out:

Source: arithmetic on the payment rate shown at the top of this page, which comes from Tilth's copy of the GOV.UK action catalogue and carries its own last-checked date. The 2 hectares is an illustration.

Is it worth it on your ground?

Step one: what it costs to put in. No seed, because nothing is sown. What it costs is a cultivation pass, and we are not going to put a number on that, because it depends on your kit, your soil and how you cost your own hours. So unlike every seeded action on this site, the payment stands at very nearly its full value.

Step two: what the ground would otherwise return. Gross margins per hectare for England, non-organic, in the 2023/24 crop year. Variable costs have already been taken off these figures, so there is nothing further to deduct.

Source: Farm Business Survey, Crop Production in England 2023/24, Rural Business Research, England, non-organic, 2023/24 column, checked 02/08/2026. The winter wheat figures come from a sample of 572 farms.

The agreement runs three years, so the comparison has to run three years too, and that ground will not be in wheat for all three of them. Three rotations, worked from the crop figures above:

Source: arithmetic on the crop gross margins in step two, from the Farm Business Survey, Crop Production in England 2023/24, checked 02/08/2026. These three are illustrations. Work your own out from the same crop figures.

Step three: the gap, which on this action is barely a gap.

Source: the payment rate at the top of this page set against the rotation averages in step two. The figures are subtraction. The cultivation pass is not in them.

That is the narrowest gap of any action on this site that takes ground out of production, and on two of the three rotations above it is close enough to nothing that the deciding factors are somewhere other than the arithmetic.

Three things to set against those figures. What follows is Tilth's own reading rather than scheme guidance.

The survey reports one winter wheat figure, not first and second wheat separately. A rotation with two wheats in it carries a second wheat at the same gross margin as the first, which is unlikely to be how it turns out on your ground. We have not found a published split to cite, so we have not applied a discount of our own invention. Read the rotation averages as the generous end for the crop, which on a gap this small matters more than it does elsewhere.

It is one year, and not a strong one. The same report's 2022/23 column put winter wheat's gross margin at £1,570 a hectare against the £988 above for 2023/24. A three-year decision resting on a single crop year is a shaky thing, and this particular year was the lower of the two. On a strong year the crop would be well clear.

The plot sits inside a crop, and that has a cost the table does not show. A fallow block in the middle of a field is something the drill, the sprayer, the spreader and the combine all have to work around for a full season. On a small plot in a big field that is a nuisance. On several plots it is a headland's worth of extra turning that does not appear in any gross margin.

Where that leaves it. On the money alone this is the closest of any of these actions to paying for itself on average ground, and on below-average ground it wins outright. What is likely to decide it is not the arithmetic but the siting rules below, which on a good many farms rule out most of the fields before the sum is even reached.

Does it work, and what makes it work better

This section is what we have found in published sources about the practice this action pays for. It is not scheme guidance, it is not Defra's or the RPA's view, and it adds no requirement beyond what the GOV.UK action page sets out. We have named every source and given the date we checked it. What it means for your ground is your decision.

The fit on this one is close. Conservation Evidence assess an action called Leave uncropped, cultivated margins or plots, including lapwing and stone curlew plots, and describe the practice as cultivated plots or strips left undrilled so that lapwing and stone curlew can nest successfully, normally more than 2 hectares in size. They draw the same distinction this page draws further up, saying plainly that these are different from skylark plots, which are much smaller and tend to be made in groups. That is AHW5 described by somebody else.

The graded assessment. Conservation Evidence, based at the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, summarises the published studies behind individual conservation actions and has independent subject experts score each one. This practice comes out at Likely to be beneficial, a category below the top, on 9 studies, with 59 per cent for effectiveness, 55 per cent for certainty, and 15 per cent for harms. Effectiveness scores only the size and direction of the reported effects, and Conservation Evidence say themselves that it does not consider the quantity or quality of the studies. Certainty is the separate score for how many studies there are, how well built they are and how much ground they cover.

The harms score is worth pausing on, because this is the first action we have written up on this site that carries one at all. Most come back as harms not assessed. Fifteen per cent is a low score rather than a high one, but it is not nothing, and the finding most likely to sit behind it is in the paragraph below about grey partridge.

Source: Conservation Evidence, action 213, Leave uncropped, cultivated margins or plots, including lapwing and stone curlew plots, Farmland Conservation synopsis, checked 22/08/2026. Cite as Dicks et al. (2020), Farmland Conservation, pages 283 to 321, in What Works in Conservation 2020, Open Book Publishers.

What the studies found, both ways. The strongest single result is about nesting rather than numbers. Sheldon and others, across 28 farms in western England over two breeding seasons, found 85 per cent of 34 lapwing nests on fields carrying cultivated lapwing plots hatched at least one chick, against 64 per cent of 154 nests on all other field types. Daily nest survival was significantly higher, and no nests at all were lost to farm operations on the plots, against more than half of those on other fields.

Chamberlain and others surveyed 212 lapwing plots on 180 farms across England in a single year and found lapwings using 39 per cent of them, with breeding suspected on a quarter. Skylarks were recorded breeding on 73 per cent of plots, grey partridge on 17 per cent and yellow wagtail on 6 per cent. Stoate and Moorcroft, in Cambridgeshire, recorded skylark nesting success of 84 per cent in a field fallowed after harvest against 35 per cent in cereal crop fields, with nests in that field rising from two to eight.

On stone curlew, Evans and Green recorded the population in southern England rising from 71 breeding pairs in 2000 to 103 in 2005 across a period in which 156 plots were created, and a 2000 review recorded the UK population rising from 150 pairs in 1991 to 233 in 1999 following a scheme that provided uncultivated plots and set-aside. Both of those describe schemes rather than plots on their own.

Against that, three studies found little or worse. Stevens and Bradbury, across 256 fields on 84 farms, found only reed bunting out of twelve farmland bird species strongly and positively associated with uncropped cultivated strips, with no other species showing a strong association either way. Field and others, across three English regions, found that in two of them Higher Level Stewardship fallow plots for ground-nesting birds held significantly fewer seed-eating farmland songbirds than conventional crop fields in summer, at roughly 1 bird a hectare on plots against 2.5 on crops in East Anglia and the Cotswolds, while the West Midlands ran the other way at 1.5 on plots against under 0.5 on crops.

And Ewald and others, across 1,031 agricultural sites in England, found a lower proportion of young grey partridges in the population in 2007 on sites carrying a large area of uncropped but cultivated margins and plots. There were no significant relationships with changes in partridge density, brood size or overwinter survival.

Conservation Evidence say themselves that studies are not directly comparable or of equal value, and that study size, design, reported metrics and relevance to your own situation matter more than "simply counting the number of studies that support a particular interpretation".

Source: Conservation Evidence, action 213, key messages and supporting evidence from individual studies, checked 22/08/2026.

What we have not found. Nothing measuring AHW5 itself. Nothing on how many plots a farm needs, or how far apart. And nothing putting a figure on the cultivation pass or on the cost of working around a plot for a season, which is the gap the money section further up this page also leaves open.

What the sources say makes it work better. All of the following comes from the studies listed on that Conservation Evidence page, and it is a description of what was found rather than advice from us.

Bare ground is the mechanism. Chamberlain and others found the probability of lapwings breeding on a plot increased with the proportion of bare ground present on it. That is the one finding that speaks directly to how the plot is managed rather than where it is put.

Then position, where the research and this action's own rules run together. The same study found lapwing occurrence decreased where there was woodland adjacent to the plot, and skylarks less likely to be found on plots near hedgerows. Evans and Green describe the stone curlew plots in their study as cultivated to a rough fallow in spring and sited away from the edges of fields.

Then something the action does not ask for. Evans and Green also report that those plots were preferably located within a kilometre of pasture, pig farms or other food sources. That is about what the birds eat rather than where they nest, and nothing on the GOV.UK page requires it.

On size, Conservation Evidence put the practice at normally more than 2 hectares, and Evans and Green describe stone curlew plots of 1 to 2 hectares of arable or set-aside.

Source: Conservation Evidence, action 213, supporting evidence from individual studies, checked 22/08/2026.

What follows is Tilth's own reading of how those findings sit against this action, and it adds no requirement beyond what the GOV.UK action page sets out.

The siting rules this page already calls the deciding factor turn out to be the part the research supports most directly. Lapwing use fell where woodland was adjacent. Skylarks avoided plots near hedgerows. Stone curlew plots were sited away from field edges. AHW5 puts a roughly 100 metre buffer around woods, in-field and hedgerow trees, buildings, power lines, roads and rights of way, and a 200 metre buffer around turbines. Those numbers are the scheme's rather than the research's, but the direction of them is the direction the findings point, which is not something we can say about every action on this site.

The bare ground finding is the one we would carry into the field. The probability of lapwings breeding rose with the proportion of bare ground on the plot, and the action's own requirement runs the same way: GOV.UK asks you to manage natural regeneration where it leaves too little bare ground. A plot that greens over is drifting away from both the finding and the requirement.

On the harms score, we would neither dismiss it nor make more of it than it is. Fifteen per cent is low. The result that appears to drive it is a lower proportion of young grey partridges on sites with a lot of uncropped cultivated ground, from a large study across 1,031 sites, with no matching effect on partridge density, brood size or overwinter survival. If you run partridges, that is worth knowing before you commit ground. If you do not, it is a footnote.

The honest limit is what this action is for. Two of the three regions in Field's work found fewer seed-eating songbirds on fallow plots than in the crop next door. That is not a failure of the action, because a bare spring fallow is not a seed-rich habitat and was never meant to be one. But it does mean this is a nesting action for particular birds rather than a general good thing for farmland wildlife, and anyone choosing between this and a seed-bearing action should read it that way.

The comparison with AHW4 is worth finishing here rather than leaving it in the money section. Skylark plots are metres across, cost almost no ground and are paid per plot. This is hectares, comes out of production properly, and is paid as ground. The evidence follows the same split: the skylark plot work is about a crop with holes in it, and this work is about a bare field in spring that a wader will nest on. They are different actions doing different jobs, and the fact that both have the word plot in them is the least useful thing about them.

What you actually have to do

By early spring, establish a fallow cultivated plot within an arable crop, and manage it in a way that can reasonably be expected to achieve the action's aim. That includes managing natural regeneration if it means there is not enough bare ground for nesting birds. Retain it until the crop is harvested in the summer and the bird nesting season has finished, which GOV.UK gives as typically late July.

Do this in each year of the action's three year duration. If the timing of the start date makes it too late in the first year, establish within twelve months of that start date. In year three, retain the plot until harvest or the agreement end date, whichever comes first.

You must also identify the land as not being at risk of soil erosion or surface runoff, and keep written evidence that you have.

Source: GOV.UK, AHW5 action page, checked 04/08/2026.

Where it can go, and what rules it out

This is where most of the decision actually sits.

The plot cannot be within about 100 metres of woods, in-field and hedgerow trees, buildings, power lines, main roads or public rights of way, and it cannot be within about 200 metres of wind turbines.

The land has to be an eligible land type below the moorland line, registered with a compatible land cover and declared with an appropriate land use code, covering arable land used to grow crops, temporary grassland under TG01 and arable land lying fallow under FA01. SSSIs need Natural England's consent first. Areas containing historic or archaeological features are not eligible, though the rest of the parcel may be. You can enter the total or part of the available area in a land parcel.

The action is rotational or static, so you can move the plot each year or leave it where it is.

Source: GOV.UK, AHW5 action page, checked 04/08/2026.

AHW5 is not one of the ten limited area actions under SFI26, so it does not draw on the 25 per cent allowance shared by CIPM2, CAHL1, CAHL2, CAHL3, CIGL1, CIGL2, WBD3, AHW7, AHW9 and AHW11.

Source: GOV.UK, SFI26 scheme rules and guidance, section 4.5, checked 23/08/2026.

Things worth watching

This section is Tilth's own reading of where this action is easy to get wrong. It is not scheme guidance, it is not sourced from Defra or the RPA, and none of it adds a requirement beyond what the GOV.UK action page sets out.

Draw the buffers before you pick the field. A single hedgerow tree takes a 100 metre radius with it, and so does a pole carrying a power line, a footpath along a boundary and the corner of a barn. On a field surrounded by hedges with trees in them, those circles can meet in the middle and leave nothing. This is a mapping job rather than a judgement call, and it is worth doing on the map before the field is chosen rather than in the tractor seat in March.

It is the fields you would least expect that qualify. The rules point towards large, open, treeless fields with no footpath and no overhead line, which on most farms are the best fields rather than the worst. That is the awkward heart of this action: the money works best on ground that returns below your rotation average, and the siting rules push you towards ground that returns above it.

Paid by the hectare, not by the plot. This is the difference between this action and AHW4 skylark plots, and it is worth being clear about it before comparing the two. Skylark plots are a few square metres apiece and paid per plot, so the effective rate per hectare of ground actually taken out is enormous and the ground lost is trivial. Here the ground comes out for real and is paid for as ground.

Early spring and typically late July are the wording, not a paraphrase. GOV.UK gives no calendar dates for either end of this action. That is more room than a fixed date, and it also means there is nothing to point at afterwards except what you actually did and when.

It is an annual action inside a three year agreement. The plot is established in each of the three years. If it is rotational it moves, which means the siting exercise above is not done once, it is done three times, against three different cropping plans.

The not-at-risk assessment is yours to make and yours to write down. The requirement is that you identify the land as not at risk of soil erosion or surface runoff, and keep written evidence of it. A cultivated bare plot left through the spring is exactly the situation that assessment exists for, so it is a document that has to exist, made by you, before the action rather than after.

Existing plots may already qualify. If you are already leaving lapwing plots, GOV.UK says they can go into the action provided they meet the requirements and are not paid for under another environmental scheme. That is worth checking before deciding to create new ones somewhere less convenient.

Keeping the evidence

Also Tilth's own reading. GOV.UK sets the requirements; what follows is a practical suggestion about record keeping.

GOV.UK gives three things as its examples: evidence that the land is not at risk of erosion or runoff, field operations at parcel level with their invoices, and photographs or other records showing the action was completed.

The awkward one here is location. The plot is inside a field rather than along an edge, it may move each year, and after harvest there is nothing on the ground to show where it was. What that suggests to us is that the record worth making is the position, at the time of cultivation, rather than a description written afterwards. The buffer distances are the other half of it: if you have satisfied yourself that a plot sits clear of the woods, the trees, the line and the footpath, that working out is worth keeping, because in two years' time neither you nor anyone else will be able to reconstruct it from memory.

Tilth lets you draw the plot on the field map at the time you cultivate it, so its position and its year are recorded together.

The part only your own ground can answer

Two questions decide this action and neither is in a national survey. The first is which of your fields are actually clear of the woods, the in-field trees, the hedgerow trees, the buildings, the lines, the roads and the footpaths. The second is which of those fields return below your own rotation average, because the gap above is small enough that this is the whole argument. One is a map question and the other is a yield question, and the answer needs both at once. Tilth holds your boundaries and your yield history in the same place. Request an invite.