North York Moors Farmers and Land Managers, can you help us advise Defra on farm incomes?
You may be aware that the North York Moors National Park Authority has been working with Defra, as part of the Environmental Land Management Test & Trials process, to deliver a project that will test opportunities for blending public and private finance to deliver actions that achieve landscape scale recovery. The National Park Authority has developed this project in recognition that farmers and land managers within the North York Moors National Park are well placed to deliver the full range of public goods that society demands, but as farms are typically small and managed independently, in order to access the opportunities of private funding, farmers and land managers are likely to have to collaborate with other to work at a scale that maximises these opportunities. To be prepared to do this, there is a need for farmers and land managers to recognise what the opportunities are and to have sufficient confidence in these opportunities and the potential outcomes to be willing to collaborate with others to make changes to land management practices.
The project aims to work with farmers and land managers to identify and understand these opportunities within the North York Moors National Park and to understand how they can be scaled up to deliver land use change at a landscape scale and deliver financial returns at a farm level.
The first phase of the project has been to develop baseline mapping that allows us to identify locations for habitat creation and restoration and opportunities for connecting new habitats to existing habitat networks within the North York Moors National Park. We have also looked at opportunities for water quality improvements and natural flood management interventions.
The second phase of the project has been to identify where biodiversity, carbon credits, water quality improvements and natural flood management interventions should yield the optimal balance between cost and benefit taking into account a range of variables. A group of North York Moors farmers and land managers who represent the range of farm types and tenure arrangements in the National Park have been involved in these first two phases.
We are now working on the third phase which includes extending and enhancing the economic modelling tool that was developed as part of the NYMNPA’s previous Test and Trials work to incorporate payments for carbon, biodiversity, water quality improvements and natural flood management interventions and show the impact of these opportunities at both a landscape scale and at the farm level.
We will be hosting a series of 10 workshops from which we want to identify the potential impacts on farm incomes of potentially available public and private income streams and will feed this learning back to Defra to help shape their policies relating to Environmental Land Management.
We are looking to host the following workshops (final details are still to be confirmed):
Wednesday 24 May 2023 – workshop in Helmsley (afternoon)
Thursday 25 May 2023 – workshop in Great Ayton (morning) and Whitby (afternoon)
Friday 26 May 2023 – workshops in Helmsley (morning & afternoon)
Wednesday 31 May – workshops in Danby (morning & afternoon)
Thursday 1 June – workshops in Cloughton (morning & afternoon)
Friday 2 June – workshop in Pickering (morning)
This email is sent as an open call to ask farmers and land managers who are farming within the North York Moors National Park if they would like to participate in one of the workshops. If you have an interest in participating or if you have any questions relating to the project, then please make contact with me either by email or by calling me on 01439 772517.