What is a Cluster?
By working together, helped by a coordinator, farmers and land managers can work cohesively in their locality. This enables them to deliver greater benefits for soil, water and wildlife at a landscape scale and benefit from private and governmental funding streams who are keen to reward this collaboration. For instance: Insurance companies would rather fund a group of Farmers to solve flooding issues than pay out for flood damage.
Benefits
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We are looking into natural capital together and finding out how Natural flood management, holding on to carbon, providing areas of nature can pay financially and provide a dependable income stream outside of the normal grants.
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Farmer clusters can benefit not only the natural environment, but farm businesses too, and trigger widespread engagement with communities. We as farmers can achieve more together than we ever would in isolation.
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We are all on this journey together, learning via Cluster events, discussions and training.
Catchment Area Map
This is a loose outline of the River Roding catchment however we are also taking other farmers / landowners in Uttlesford and the West Essex District.
How we got involved?
Bury farm at Great Canfield is a 3rd generation mixed farm 2 miles from the source of the Roding, we grow wheat, barley and borage and have a herd of native breed Redpoll cattle who are used for conservation grazing on the rivers water meadows. The farm having has been involved in environmental schemes of some sort since 2003.
We started the cluster following a meeting with Thames 21 where local farmers heard about Mink trapping along the Roding.
It didn't take us long to decide that we wanted to work together with other farmers in West Essex and the Roding to create a community of farmers who work together to increase biodiversity, manage flooding with natural interventions, and work in a way that can link projects so that nature can easily move between farms. On our farm we have noticed a huge upsurge in biodiversity due to habitat restoration and nature friendly farming practices, small changes can make a huge difference, it would be great to see this work on a bigger scale by linking our projects.
