Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Exmoor trial clears route to transition
Farmers take part in scheme to ease Environmental Land Management launch. Lewis Clarke reports
ADEFRA-FUNDED trial on 26 Exmoor farms and smallholdings has helped provide evidence to the Government for the true cost of delivering public goods in a National Park alongside a viable farm business.
Working with the Exmoor Hill Farming Network (EHFN) and environmental consultancy firm Rural Focus, Exmoor National Park Authority was commissioned by Defra to test principles for mapping the delivery of public goods on individual farms, to help identify key areas for investment and collaboration.
It is hoped the findings will help identify ways to better support farmers in protected landscapes ahead of the transition to the Government’s new flagship scheme for Environmental Land Management (ELM), and a new pilot due to take place later this year.
Chris and Paula Williams work in partnership with Chris’s parents to run two farms on Exmoor – a familyowned Exmoor hill farm on the edge of Winsford Hill and a National Trust tenanted farm on the Holnicote Estate, near Minehead.
They have a family of three boys, around 70 suckler cows and 700 ewes, and are in the process of setting up a luxury glamping enterprise.
Commenting on why they got involved in the trial, Paula said: “For us, it’s about building resilience across our farms to help sustain the business and ensure that a future in farming is as viable for the next generation.
“We want to get to know every aspect of our farm’s potential and play our part in helping Defra understand the true contribution hill farming makes towards caring for the landscape.”
At an online EHFN event held in May to report on the findings, Robert Deane, of Rural Focus, told farmers: “We combined several layers of data to build a picture of what each farm delivers for the environment and for people and created heat maps to show the potential to scale up these activities.
“The outgoing basic payments scheme simply isn’t set up to account for this level of detail and in some ways hasn’t properly incentivised farmers wanting to ‘do the right thing’ for nature.
“This is particularly true in upland areas like Exmoor, where a volatile market and tighter margins leave very little room for manoeuvre. Based on our findings, we hope the new system will be fairer and simpler.”
Key findings fed back to Defra in the final report include:
■ Potential threats to important designated habitats in upland areas like Exmoor. Any fall in farm payments could drive a drop in land under agri-environment schemes. Sites such as heather moorland, wetlands and wood pasture were identified as particularly vulnerable, because the grazing regimes that sustain them often only marginally benefit the farm business. Figures reported by National Parks England already show a downward trend, with a nearly 17 per cent drop in the amount of farmland on Exmoor under such schemes since 2015.
■ Potential barriers to farms being able to access ELM funding. The report draws attention to high demand for skilled advisers to help draw up ELM proposals, with 88 per cent of respondents to a survey of EHFN members stating they expect to need the services of an adviser to help them complete their ELM Land Management Plan, but only around half knowing where they might get this advice.
■ Opportunities for achieving nature recovery at landscape scale. Mapping of farm clusters helped provide evidence for collaborative working on shared environmental outcomes – for example, helping to create nature corridors or deliver improvements to water quality or flood resilience. This could help with mapping out Nature Recovery Networks, which may become a requirement for Local Authorities if proposals in the new Environmental Bill are enacted.
■ Difficulty accounting for farming’s contribution to “sense of place” – the features of the landscape and local culture that come together to create the overall experience. The report highlights more research is needed to be able to quantify aspects such as cultural heritage, historic features, wildlife, public access and engagement.
The work builds on an earlier “Exmoor’s Ambition” report presented to former Environment Secretary Michael Gove on a visit to Exmoor in June, 2018.
Dave Knight, chair of the EHFN, said: “An idea that started with farmers around the kitchen table has grown into a living example of how the future of farm policy might work under a new system of awarding public money for public goods. Around 56 per cent of the national park is farmland and we really hope this report goes some way towards demonstrating to Government what we have to offer, and how best our industry can be supported to deliver multiple benefits for people and nature.”
Alex Farris, conservation manager at Exmoor National Park Authority, who led the trial, said: “What has been particularly encouraging about this trial is the sheer opportunity for farm clusters to link up their assets, like field margins, hedgerows, wood pasture and restored hay meadows, to make an even greater contribution.
“It’s this kind of landscape scale nature restoration that hasn’t been achievable until now and that could prove the lifeline for many of our native species as we face the realities of climate change,” Mr Farris added.