Hoog

Water

Give a hectare

Buying drained peat meadow back, parcel by parcel, and letting the water up until the ground stops sinking.

A wide, low bog plain with standing water lying in the hollows and hills in the distance.

Our Ground

Hoog Water buys drained peat meadow and puts the water table back to within twenty centimetres of the surface. Below that line the peat stops oxidising and starts holding again; above it, the ground burns quietly and sinks about a centimetre a year. We do not farm any of it ourselves. It is grazed by whoever is willing to graze it wet, on a lease that ends the day a pump goes back on. Forty-one hectares so far, in eleven parcels, all of them within sight of the same church tower.

€ 4,200 buys one hectare.
About a tenth of that
goes to the notary.

Give a hectare

Or a tenth of one, which is how most of it arrives.

Not deductible yet
The foundation exists; the charitable status does not, and the application has been sitting since March. Until it comes through your gift is not deductible. We would rather you knew that before you gave than after.
What we do not do
We do not plant trees on peat, we do not sell carbon credits, and we do not buy a parcel unless the water rights come with it. Land without the water is just land.
The lease
Grazing goes to whoever will do it wet, at about a third of the going rate. The lease ends the day a pump goes back on. That has happened once, in the second year.
Overheads
Two people at two days a week and a desk in somebody else’s office. Eleven per cent last year, and the whole sheet is one page long.
What is not working
Two of the eleven parcels are still too dry to count, because the ditch on the far side is not ours. They stay on the list with the rest until they are wet.
What we keep
A name and an address for the receipt, seven years, because the tax office says so. No newsletter unless you ask for one, and nothing is counted on this page.
Our Ground Give

Hoog Water

Hoog Water is a fictional example. The foundation, the hectares and the amounts do not exist. Photographs are stock images and do not show this land.