BFS66m to 12m habitat strip next to watercourses

What it actually is

Most of the buffer actions ask you to put grass beside the water. This one asks you to put trees and scrub there.

The strip is at least 6 metres wide and paid up to 12 metres, averaged across each land parcel, next to a ditch, river, stream or canal. You establish it either by letting trees and scrub regenerate naturally, or by planting native riparian species, or by doing both.

GOV.UK's stated aim is that throughout the year there is a habitat strip next to a watercourse with a mosaic of grassland vegetation and naturally colonised or planted native tree and scrub species which are near the watercourse and have an open canopy, with tussocky grasses allowed to develop, and without livestock, tracks or compacted areas. The page gives the purpose as reducing soil erosion and nutrient loss, increasing water filtration, slowing runoff, shading the watercourse, providing habitat and food for wildlife, and forming links between habitats.

Source: GOV.UK, BFS6 action page, checked 05/08/2026.

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 hectarages use the action page's own measurement rule, which is length in metres times width in metres, divided by 10,000. The 1,000 metres is an illustration.

At 6 metres, a hectare of strip is about 1,667 metres of watercourse. At 12 metres it is about 833 metres. The strip can be wider than 12 metres, but you are only paid for the 12 metre width.

Source: arithmetic on the widths given on the GOV.UK BFS6 action page, checked 05/08/2026.

Is it worth it on your ground?

Step one: what it costs to put in. There are two routes and they cost very different amounts. Natural regeneration costs nothing in materials. Planting native riparian trees and scrub costs whatever whips, guards, stakes, labour or contractor time come to on your ground, and that depends on species, spacing and how much of it you do yourself.

We have not found a published figure for that we would put on a page about money, so we are not going to invent one. The gap is deliberate. What matters for the sum below is that the planted route is not a nil cost action and the naturally regenerated one very nearly is, and the figures that follow have no establishment cost in them at all.

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.

These are arable figures. This action is also available on improved permanent grassland and on scrub, and we have not got a verified gross margin for grazing or silage on the same basis, so if that is your ground the comparison below is the wrong one and you will need to put your own number against the payment.

The agreement runs three years, so the comparison has to run three years too, and arable 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 unusually small.

Source: the payment rate at the top of this page set against the rotation averages above. The figures are subtraction. Establishment costs are not in them.

Against two of the three rotations this is within about £30 a hectare a year of what the ground returns as crop, before any allowance for the fact that the ground in question is a watercourse edge rather than a field average. On the money alone, that is as close as any of these actions gets.

Step four: the money is not the difficult part of this decision.

What follows is Tilth's own reading rather than scheme guidance, and it adds no requirement beyond the GOV.UK action page.

Every other figure on this site compares three years of payment against three years of cropping, because that is what the agreement covers and at the end of it the ground goes back. A grass strip can be sprayed off and ploughed in. That is not what this action leaves behind.

At the end of three years you have native trees and scrub on that strip, at whatever stage they have got to, plus deadwood you were asked to leave in place. Nothing in the action requires you to keep it after the agreement ends. But putting that ground back into cropping is a grubbing-out job rather than a cultivation, and the three-year arithmetic above does not carry that cost anywhere in it.

So the sum on this page is close, and the sum is not the question. The question is whether you would be content for that particular strip to be out of production for a good deal longer than three years. If the answer is yes, the money is fine. If the answer is no, no rate would make it right.

Two things to set against the crop figures above. Also Tilth's own reading.

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.

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. Against that stronger year the gaps above widen.

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.

This is the poorest fit between published evidence and a scheme action anywhere on this site, and it is better said at the top than worked up to.

What BFS6 pays for is native trees and scrub with an open canopy, tussocky grass between them and deadwood left where it falls, all of it beside water. What we have found published work on is grass buffer strips and margins around arable and pasture fields. The grass part of that mosaic is covered by the work below, and the tussocky part of it reasonably well. The trees, the scrub, the open canopy, the shading of the watercourse and the deadwood are not. A handful of studies measured what happened where a grass strip sat next to woody cover, and those are the ones that reach furthest into this action, but none of them planted the wood as part of the strip. Read what follows as evidence about part of what this action builds rather than about the whole of it.

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 is assessed twice. In the Farmland Conservation synopsis it comes out in the top category, Beneficial, on 69 studies, with 90 per cent for effectiveness and 65 per cent for certainty, and harms not assessed. In the Bird Conservation synopsis, assessed for birds alone, it comes out a category lower, Likely to be beneficial, on 15 studies, with 47 per cent for effectiveness, 54 per cent for certainty and 0 per cent for harms. Effectiveness scores only the size and direction of the effects that were reported. Certainty is the separate score for how many studies there are, how well built they are and how much ground they cover. Neither score is about the wooded version of a buffer strip, because nothing in either synopsis measures one.

Source: Conservation Evidence, action 246, Plant grass buffer strips/margins around arable or pasture fields, Farmland Conservation synopsis, and action 191, the same practice for birds, Bird Conservation synopsis, both checked 06/08/2026. Cite as Dicks et al. (2020), Farmland Conservation, pages 283 to 321, and Williams et al. (2020), Bird Conservation, pages 137 to 281, both in What Works in Conservation 2020, Open Book Publishers.

What the studies found, both ways. Nineteen studies from Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK found grass buffer strips increased the abundance, species richness and diversity of insects and spiders. Nine UK studies found benefits to birds. Seven studies from the Netherlands and the UK found increased plant cover and plant species richness, and five from Finland and the UK found more small mammals. Against those, six studies from the Netherlands and the UK, three of them replicated controlled trials, found no clear effect on insect numbers, bird numbers or invertebrate pest populations, and a site comparison found sown grassy margins were not the best option for conserving rare arable plants. 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". The individual studies run from 1994 to 2011, so every one of them predates this scheme and this action.

Source: Conservation Evidence, actions 246 and 191, key messages and supporting evidence from individual studies, checked 06/08/2026.

What we have not found. This is still the longer half of the section on this page. We have not found published work on woody riparian strips as this action defines them, on shading a watercourse with scrub, on managing an open canopy next to water, or on what deadwood left in a strip does. We have not found anything at all on the water side of the action's stated purpose, which is reducing soil erosion and nutrient loss, increasing filtration and slowing runoff, and that gap holds across both synopses and all 84 studies between them. And we have found nothing measuring BFS6 itself. If a source turns up that covers the woody half of this action properly, this section gets rewritten around it and the date on it changes.

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

Start with the studies that had woody cover in them, because they are the ones nearest this action. Bokenstrand and others, in southern Sweden, widened field boundaries and compared plots planted with dog rose, plots sown with meadow plants, plots sown with a clover and grass mix and plots left to regenerate. A year on, the clover and grass plots held fewer plant species than the plots with roses or meadow plants. Seven years on, total weed cover was higher on the clover and grass plots and on the naturally regenerated ones than on the plots with roses or meadow plants. Conservation Evidence add a caveat to that one, which is that it is not clear whether the result for the clover and grass plots came from the grass or from the clover in the mix. Haaland and Gyllin, in Sweden, found bushes next to a sown grass strip raised butterfly species richness and the abundance of both butterflies and bumblebees. Field and Mason, in Essex, recorded more gatekeeper butterflies on grass margins with an adjacent hedge than on margins without one, and Field and others, in the same set of farms, found higher butterfly species richness and higher plant species richness on margins running alongside hedgerows than on those without. Field and others again, surveying 100 farms across three English regions, found hedges alongside floristically enhanced grass margins held an estimated 0.4 yellowhammers a metre against 0.2 for hedges with no margin, while hedges alongside unenhanced margins showed no such difference. Pywell and others found the reverse ordering for overwintering ground beetles and spiders, with hedge bases carrying more than field margins did, mature hedge bases holding 12 of the aphid predator Bembidion lampros a square metre against 8 in a recently sown grass margin.

Then the tussocky grass, which this action asks for between the trees. Woodcock and others found margins containing tussock grasses carried more predatory beetles, and more species of them, than margins of fine grasses alone, whether or not wildflowers were in the mix. In an earlier year of the same trial they found the tussock grass and wildflower mix carried about as many beetles as a plain grass mix and more than a fine grass and wildflower mix. Ogilvy and others found birds favoured the tussock grass and wildflower mix in 2003, and that bumblebee abundance and species richness were highest on it and lowest on the standard grass mix. Carvell and others, on the other hand, found 6 metre plots sown with a tussocky grass mix supported no more bumblebees than conventionally cropped margins.

And management, which is the half of this action you have most control over. Henderson and others ran a randomised replicated controlled trial in eastern England from 2002 to 2006, setting three seed mixes, one of them a tussock grass mix, against three spring treatments: cut to 15 cm, soil disturbed by scarification until 60 per cent of the area was bare ground, and treated with a grass-killing herbicide at half the recommended rate. They concluded that management affects bird use more than the seed mix does. In summer, bird densities were higher on the disturbed and herbicide-treated plots than on the cut ones. In winter it went the other way, with twice as many birds on cut margins as on uncut ones across ten farms. Askew and others found more small mammals in 6 metre margins cut every two or three years than in those cut every year, though the difference was significant only for common shrews in one of the two years.

On width, Smith found meadow grasshopper density significantly higher in 6 metre margins than in 2 metre ones, Shore and others trapped 26 to 38 bank voles an autumn period on 6 metre margins against 13 to 14 on 3 metre ones, and Conover and others, in the bird synopsis, recorded 35 birds a hectare on borders of 20 to 56 metres, 18 on borders of 6 to 12 metres and 3 on fields with no border. Askew and others found the opposite for small mammals overall, with the highest numbers in the 2 metre margins.

Source: Conservation Evidence, actions 246 and 191, supporting evidence from individual studies, checked 06/08/2026.

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 woody studies are the ones worth dwelling on, because they are the only ones that put trees or shrubs and a grass strip on the same ground. Five of them point the same way: something woody next to or within the strip did better than the strip on its own, for butterflies, for bumblebees and for yellowhammers. None of them is a measurement of BFS6. A hedge is not the open-canopy scrub this action asks for, a dog rose in a Swedish field boundary is not a native tree beside an Essex ditch, and a floristically enhanced margin is not a tussocky grass mosaic. But the direction is consistent, and one of them, Bokenstrand's, found the woody planting beat the sown grass on plant species richness and on weed cover, which is the closest thing we have found to the question this action actually poses.

Pywell's result is the honest counterweight and belongs in the same paragraph. Overwintering beetles and spiders were more abundant in hedge bases than in field margins, which sounds like a point for the woody version until you notice it was the recently sown grass margin, not the hedge, that held the most of one of the two important aphid predators. Different groups answer differently, and which one you care about decides which finding you weigh.

The tussocky grass evidence is more useful here than it looks. BFS6 does not prescribe a seed mix, but it does specify tussocky grass between the trees, and three studies found tussock grasses carried more predatory beetles, more birds in one year and more bumblebees than the alternatives, while a fourth found no bumblebee benefit at all. It is a modest, mixed set of findings, and it is one of the few parts of this action the published work speaks to directly.

Henderson's conclusion still has an odd echo in this action. What BFS6 prescribes is management: cutting woody growth to keep the canopy open, controlling weeds and invasive species, removing the cut material, leaving deadwood and veteran trees where it is safe to. On the evidence we have found, the management half is the half worth getting right, and that is the half this action already asks you to judge for yourself.

What none of it tells you is whether trees are a better use of that particular field edge than grass would be. The money section put BFS6 and BFS1 side by side and could not separate them on the rate. This section gets closer than the last version of it did, because the woody studies lean one way, but it cannot separate them either, because not one of those studies measured the wooded version of a watercourse buffer.

What you actually have to do

Establish and maintain a habitat strip that is at least 6 metres wide and up to 12 metres wide, on average in each land parcel, buffering a ditch, river, stream or canal.

Establish it either through natural regeneration of trees and scrub, or by planting native riparian species, or both. Establish the strip within the first 12 months of the action's duration and maintain it throughout each subsequent year.

Manage it in a way that can reasonably be expected to achieve the action's aim, which includes cutting woody growth to create and maintain an open canopy along the bank, controlling the spread of injurious weeds, nettles or invasive non-native species, removing cut material when you cut to control woody growth or that spread, leaving any standing and fallen deadwood in place if it is safe to do so, and leaving any mature and veteran trees in place if it is safe to do so.

Source: GOV.UK, BFS6 action page, checked 05/08/2026.

What you cannot do on it

On the habitat strip: no livestock access, no regular vehicular access, turning or storage such as storing bales or machinery, no fertilisers or manures, and no pesticides except herbicides used to weed wipe or spot treat injurious weeds, invasive non-native species, nettles or bracken.

You must not create or maintain hard standing, boardwalks or closely mown access routes running parallel to the ditch, river, stream or canal.

You must not cut or remove vegetation, unless you are doing so to control woody growth, weeds, nettles or invasive non-native species, to maintain existing access routes running perpendicular to the watercourse, or to establish the habitat strip on previously arable land.

Source: GOV.UK, BFS6 action page, checked 05/08/2026.

Where it can go, and any cap

Agricultural land below the moorland line, next to a ditch, river, stream or canal. The eligible combinations are arable land used to grow crops, temporary grassland and arable land lying fallow with an arable land cover, improved permanent grassland with permanent grassland cover, and scrub with an ungrazeable scrub or notional scrub cover.

The action is static, so it stays in the same place each year of the agreement. The strip can be wider than 12 metres but only 12 metres is paid.

Source: GOV.UK, BFS6 action page, checked 05/08/2026.

BFS6 is not one of the limited area actions under SFI26, so the 25 per cent of total agricultural area rule that applies to actions like CAHL2 and AHW9 does not apply to it. As with the other buffer actions, the real ceiling is how much watercourse you have.

Source: GOV.UK, SFI26 scheme rules and guidance, section 4.5, checked 05/08/2026.

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.

Twelve metres is where this action and BFS1 meet, and the money is not what separates them. On arable ground beside a watercourse, twelve metres is the top of this action's paid width and the bottom of BFS1's. So on that one width you may have a real choice between a grass buffer strip and a wooded one. The two rates are close, and both move independently, so put the two panels side by side rather than taking a figure from us. The difference that actually matters is not the rate. It is that one of them leaves you a grass strip and the other leaves you trees.

Twelve months is not long for trees. The strip has to be established within the first 12 months. Natural regeneration is permitted and costs nothing, but it works on the ground's own timetable rather than the agreement's. Whether your ditch sides will throw up native trees and scrub inside a year is a question about your ground and your local seed sources, and it is worth answering properly before choosing the free route over the planted one.

This is not plant it and leave it. The aim asks for an open canopy, and the requirements ask you to cut woody growth to create and maintain it. There is no fixed date on that, which means it is an ongoing job you have to judge for yourself, and there is nothing afterwards to point at except what you actually did and when.

No route along the bank. Hard standing, boardwalks and closely mown routes running parallel to the watercourse are all out. Routes running across it, at right angles, can be maintained. If your current way to the far end of a field is along the ditch bank, that changes with this action, and it changes for every year of it.

Livestock have to be kept off. On arable ground that is nothing. On improved permanent grassland it means fencing, and fencing is a cost we have no verified figure for, so put your own in before comparing the payment against what the grazing returns.

Deadwood and veteran trees stay, if it is safe to do so. That is a judgement, and it is yours. Somewhere near a road, a footpath or a building it is worth writing down what you decided and why at the time you decided it.

It is static. No moving it for year two.

The width is an average across the land parcel. A stretch that narrows is only offset by a wider stretch somewhere else in the same parcel, so measure the whole parcel rather than the best of it.

Keeping the evidence

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

This action is harder to evidence than a grass strip, because the thing being paid for changes shape over the three years and there is no single annual operation like a cut that marks each year off.

What we would keep is the establishment record first: the method, the date, and if you planted, the species, the spacing and the invoice. Then a dated photograph record from fixed points along the strip, at roughly the same time each year, because a photograph sequence is the only practical way to show a mosaic of grassland and open-canopied scrub developing rather than just asserting it. Then the management passes: each time you cut woody growth to keep the canopy open, or treated weeds, with the date and what you did.

The two judgement calls are worth writing down at the time as well: why you decided a piece of deadwood or a mature tree was or was not safe to leave, and how you satisfied yourself the strip was established inside the first twelve months.

Tilth measures the strip off the field boundary you have already drawn, and keeps the planting record, the cutting passes and the photographs against that same strip so the sequence stays together.

The part only your own ground can answer

The arithmetic on this page comes out closer than on almost any other action here, and it still does not decide anything, because the real question is which of your watercourse edges you would be content to see under trees for longer than the agreement lasts. That is not a field question and it is not a gross margin question. It is a whole-farm map question, asked about the ground you crop worst and the water you care most about. Tilth holds your boundaries, your watercourses and your yield history in the same place, which is where a question like that gets answered. Request an invite.