North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster: Landscape-scale nature recovery on farmland

Governance

The Cluster is a Community Interest Company (CIC) comprising a group of local farmers and landowners with three directors, two facilitators, and a six-member advisory group (3). To join as a ‘Farmer Member’, with access to discussion sessions, projects and collective funding, landowners are requested to pay 1 pound per hectare per annum (22). Alternatively, advisors, NGOs and other stakeholders can join for free as a ‘Farmer Follower’ or ‘Friend’, who can attend selected group events and receive updates. The group works closely with other organisations in the area, including the Evenlode Catchment Partnership (ECP), FarmED, and the Heritage Wheat Group, as well as national agencies. For example, during the design of the Pudlicote floodplain restoration scheme, the landowner partnered with specialists including the Environment Agency, Natural England, Cotswolds Seeds and the Forestry Commission, with a total of 25 people consulted (17).

Finance

The Cluster applies for different projects and grants to fund restoration projects and support facilitation (20). Agri-environment schemes are a key source of funding. The cluster was awarded £500,000 of government funding to establish the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project as part of Defra’s Environmental Land Management scheme. Defra’s Farming in Protected Landscapes programme provided funding for habitat creation in Lyneham between 2021 to 2024, the restoration of the Windrush floodplain meadows between 2022 to 2024, and the supplementary feeding of farmland birds (18) (19). The Pudlicote habitat restoration project provided the basis for a ‘habitat bank’ owned by the landowner that could sell Biodiversity Net Gain projects to developers and infrastructure providers.

The Cluster also initiated a project with Rothamsted Research and Oxbury Bank, funded by an 18-month grant from the Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (administered by the Environment Agency on behalf of Defra) to develop financial products and services that ‘bridge the gap’ by supporting farmers to pay for upfront costs of natural capital improvement, thus enabling future income streams from ecosystem service payments (23).

Monitoring and evaluation

The project is devoting significant effort to establishing robust baselines against which to measure future outcomes. Baseline information on rivers, wetlands, meadows and grasslands, and woodlands was collected and mapped prior to landscape restoration efforts in the Evenlode Catchment and have been developed into an online data portal that sets the strategic direction for any interventions in the catchment (23). Maps of land cover change since 1945 were also compiled for the catchment area (8). Projects use innovative survey techniques to inform restoration initiatives. For example, ground-based LiDAR scans were used to assess the historic course (palaeochannel) of straightened rivers, to inform restoration plans (6).

For monitoring soil organic carbon, standard methods include ‘loss on ignition’, or the more expensive but more precise DUMAS method, but these both require off-site laboratory analysis. To provide quicker and cheaper on-site estimates, handheld near infrared spectrometers (Neospectra) were used (24) – a strategy developed by Rothamsted Research. Some fields have been measured using both laboratory analysis and the handheld scanners, while others have only used the scanners, and some have not been measured (16). The combined datasets have been used to generate a calibration curve with estimates of uncertainty and error to estimate total carbon stocks across the cluster.

Monetary benefits from restoration have been assessed at the planning stage for several initiatives. For example, the One Field pilot project (2) calculated the potential financial benefits of a progressive transition from arable cereal cropping to a mosaic of habitats on a farm that floods regularly. Impacts of these changes on soil loss, carbon capture, nutrient retention, water retention, knowledge transfer, and biodiversity were calculated using a natural capital and ecosystem services approach, finding that the loss in food production was eight times less than the financial gain from habitat recovery. Given the benefits, these changes are being implemented both on the modelled field and on other fields in the cluster. A similar assessment for the Pudlicote scheme estimated monetary benefits over 25 years from food production, air quality, water quality, flow regulation, erosion regulation, climate regulation, pollination potential, and recreation (13). Using a conservative valuation approach to account for uncertainty in the assumptions, this estimated that every £1 spent on delivery could generate £6 in benefits.

Strategies for effective landscape recovery are being tested and developed using pilot sites. For example, baseline data on biodiversity is being collected on the sites for five flagship projects to restore species-rich grassland as part of the Windrush Floodplain Meadows Restoration project. Learnings from these five sites will then be used to create a floodplain meadow management and restoration strategy (25).

Trade-offs and limitations

Management options for increasing soil carbon in cropland can have positive impacts on climate change mitigation but may have tradeoffs. For example, arable/pasture rotation can support carbon sequestration and soil health, but results in less arable crop production alongside more livestock production.

The supplementary feeding project enhanced bird numbers on feeding sites compared to control plots, but this only tells us that the birds are attracted to sites providing food (26). Future research will analyse the landscape-level impacts of supplementary feeding by comparing farming practices across farms, which may help to reveal the relative importance of supplementary feeding versus sustainable farming practices to facilitate long-term resilience in bird populations. However, in the short-term, supplementary feeding can attract large numbers of birds to the farm which could shift farmer perspectives on their relationship with birds and their value to farms.