What is a Farmer Cluster?

A farmer group or cluster is a group of farmers and land managers who work together, helped by an advisor or facilitator.

In the Tove Valley farmer cluster, we work together to share skills, experiences, and explore more sustainable approaches to farming. Working together means we can collectively deliver greater benefits for wildlife, soil and water at a landscape-scale than each could achieve by working individually. Importantly, a cluster is led by the farmers themselves.

The Tove Valley farmer cluster formed in 2019 and currently includes six members, managing 3,851 hectares (ha) of land between Northampton and Milton Keynes. We are funded through the Countryside Stewardship Facilitation Fund, which supports group training and on-farm demonstration activities for members.

As a group, we are working to improve our collective understanding and capacity to deliver:

Well-managed riverside habitats, ancient and native woodlands, wood pasture and parkland.
Habitats for farmland birds and wild pollinators.
Improved water quality, flood risk management and protection of historic features.

Topics for future planned activities include wild pollinators and natural pest predators, soil health, woodlands and tree diseases, riverside features, wood pasture and veteran trees, and managing historic features.

CREATING NEW HABITATS

The farmer cluster already looks after almost 400 ha of deciduous woodland Priority Habitat, over 250 ha of wood pasture and parkland and over 100 miles of hedgerow. That’s enough hedge to stretch from Northampton to the Isle of Wight!

Since forming, group members have created 36 ha of new

flower-rich habitats. These include field margins of sown native wildflowers and grasses as well as larger blocks of habitat. These provide lots of pollen and nectar from spring to early autumn, as well as homes for beetles, spiders, voles and shrews. Managed sensitively by cutting, some patches are left uncut to provide shelter for insects over the winter.

This area of flower-rich habitat also includes strips and blocks of leguminous plants such as clovers and vetches, which provide a glut of pollen and nectar for bee species in early summer.

The group has also created 22 ha of winter bird food – these are mixtures of seed-producing plants grown and left specifically as food for farmland birds. In combination with supplementary feeding, these features are crucial in helping smaller birds survive the winter and be fit enough to breed well the following spring.

Already, group members have also created 26 ha of new grass buffer strips. That’s a total area larger than Greenwich Park in London. These are usually beside watercourses, ditches or natural habitats such as woodland or hedgerows. They protect those features from agricultural operations and provide useful habitat for a range of butterfly species, small mammals and birds such as Kestrel and Barn Owl that hunt along them.

A further 54 ha of flower-rich habitats, 31 ha of winter bird food and 19 ha of buffer strips are planned to be created over the next year.

Other new conservation measures introduced include growing cover crops to protect and improve soils over winter, planting 1.3 km of new hedge, restoring a further 1.8 km and creating new scrapes and footdrains in the floodplain.

BIG FARMLAND BIRD COUNT

In our first year, many group members took part in the GWCT Big Farmland Bird Count. Across nine count sites, together we recorded 1,060 birds of 56 different species, including Lapwing, Linnet, Skylark, Grey wagtail and Tree sparrow.

SOIL TESTING

Kindly supported by Anglian Water, each of the group members has had two fields soil-sampled and tested for not only chemical and physical properties, but indicators of biological health as well.

WATER QUALITY

Several group members have carried out testing of the nitrates and phosphates in water on their farms. Both can be significant pollutants of freshwaters such as ponds and rivers and can come from water treatment stations and agricultural sources. Hand-held PackTest kits enable farmers to assess water quality themselves quickly.