Corner Copses

In this article Gabriel Hemery highlights a spatial inefficiency which could offer a massive win-win, both for farmers at a practical level, and for policy makers struggling to deal with hard-to-reach tree planting targets and the threat of waning food security. It sits right at the intersection of geometry, agricultural engineering, and ecological restoration, namely the field corner.

Modern farm machinery—combines and increasingly high-powered tractors with trailed sprayers—is built for scale and straight lines. Yet, British agricultural fields are framed by historic, irregular boundaries. When heavy machinery negotiates tight 90-degree turns, the physics of turning radii creates an unsown, under-managed wedge (Grisso et al., 2002). In geometry, a four-pointed concave shape bounded by inward-curving arcs is known as a tetracuspid (or astroid).

By his calculations, across Great Britain, roughly half a million of these tetracuspid-shaped field corners exist. By formalising their natural regeneration into what we might call Project Tetracuspid to create thousands of Corner Copses would offer a land-use solution that advances national spatial strategy, meets statutory nature recovery targets, supercharges hedgerow networks, and builds farm-level climate resilience—all without sacrificing productive agricultural capacity.

Follow this link to read more about Corner Copses

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