Why we believe biodiversity is important!
Why we believe biodiversity is important...
At Warner’s we believe that protecting biodiversity on and around our farm – and across the globe – should be at the heart of our brand and what we do.
Coincidentally, we’re now in the final year of the UN Decade of Biodiversity (2011-2020), a campaign focused around safeguarding biodiversity across the world. The aim was to develop a network to highlight the importance of biodiversity, in order to address the challenges we face: to slow and stop the loss of biodiversity.
Our dedication to this comes to life in so many ways: many of our gin botanicals are super foods for bees, and the act of sourcing materials locally and bringing ingredients back home to the farm means the benefits go far beyond the realms of traceability. So far, we’ve converted over 5 acres of our farm to Botanical Gardens – planting in excess of 5,700 botanicals in 2019.
Last year, we worked to become self-sufficient in lemon balm, lemon thyme and lemon verbena for our incredible Lemon Balm Gin, where we harvest botanicals and distil them fresh, within an hour. On a sunny day, if you sit down on the farm next to flowering lemon thyme, you’ll hear the gentle buzz of countless bumblebees, honeybees, solitary bees, butterflies, hoverflies and moths that are gorging on their beautiful flowers. It’s amazing that this has not only provided a source of life for local pollinator populations, but we saw noticeable improvement in the quality of our summer honey harvest of 2019, which goes into our Honeybee Gin.
Each year, we’re aiming to bring the total mileage of our botanicals down and bring all elements of our craft of gin production as close to the farm as possible. To us, gin isn’t just about herbal alchemy: by growing more botanicals on our farm, we’re reducing road miles and in turn providing a resource for local wildlife, from native species of invertebrates to farmland birds.
2020 is the year where we look to self-sufficiency in other core botanicals across our range of gins, further improving biodiversity and the health of pollinators. As we move forward, we’ve got some amazing things in the pipeline. Keep an eye out for the next update from us.
#SustainabilitySunday #FarmGrown #Biodiversity
