Development plan for the landscape of Twickel

In drawing up the LOP, we took a close look at the historical landscape and how it is used today. It is impossible to restore the landscape to the state in which it once was. It was once on a small scale with many wooded banks. The landscape must also be workable for the farmers. The LOP has been drawn up on the basis of three layers. (1) The historical layer – often small-scale, with ash trees, enclosed fields and meadows with wooded banks. (2) The ‘working’ landscape: functional for farmers, but also functional in terms of ecological connections, for example. (3) The landscape as users experience it: how they move through it, where the visual axes lie, the relations between open and closed, etc.

The Energy Transition, the development of agriculture towards more cyclical outdoor crops, and the Forest Strategy that aims to increase the surface area of forests and landscape elements by 10 per cent throughout the country in the coming ten years: these are the agrarian developments and transitions that Twickel wants to use in the landscape development plan to arrive at a richer, more cohesive and beautiful landscape. Eleven guiding principles have been established to that end. The selection of these principles is a response to the major challenges of the present in combination with what is going on in the landscape and tradition of Twickel.

The estate wants to maintain the recreational quality and attractiveness, as well as strengthening them in certain places. Quality and sustainability are the key factors for Twickel. One of the implications is that the estate aims to achieve a climate-resistant and ecologically valuable hydrological system and soil management. Various measures can be taken to make the Twickel hydrological system sustainable again. This calls for the restoration of the courses of brooks at certain points and the deceleration of water drainage. Brooks must be planted with the appropriate vegetation, and meadowlands can serve as catchment areas for surplus water in the event of flooding in the lower level.

The landscapes of Twickel are diverse. The development of the landscape is aimed at more emphatically reinforcing the different landscapes. Wooded banks are restored, improved and better linked with one another to form a continuous network. The share of agrarian farming will increase and so will crop diversity. Twickel is putting a lot of energy into improving biodiversity. As an estate where farmers work in relation to the landscape and to nature, Twickel wants to contribute to making agrarian enterprises more sustainable by stimulating a sustainable, ecologically valuable, fully outdoor agrarian system, and co-funding green-blue services.

Of course Twickel also assumes its responsibility for the energy transition. That is why Twickel will cut back as much as possible the use of energy by buildings (through insulation) and mobility, as well as making use of waste from pruning as a biomass to produce electricity and warmth. In the coming period Twickel wants to fill as many roofs as possible with solar panels in a highly integrated and aesthetically responsible way. On this estate with large areas of forest, judicious forestry conservation can retain a lot of CO2 for a long period, and an accelerated development towards nature-inclusive agriculture will increase the hydrogen content in the soil. Twickel sees windmills as a possible means to generate energy,  but following the Groningen model with small windmills, for example near farms, that are appropriate for the small-scale landscape and thus more easy to place.