English
GROWING THE GOODS
The Defra ELMS trial to map, assess and improve delivery of public goods in the horticulture sector
LWA Project Officers: Rebecca Laughton, Bella Thompson and Carolyn Coxe
The LWA has been working on its Growing the Goods trial since July 2020. The trial forms part of Defra’s Environmental Land Management Scheme (E.L.M.S.) Tests and Trials programme and aims to co-design and test tools which will enable horticulture growers of all scales and systems to benefit from E.L.M.S. payments. After successfully completing phase 1 in October 2021, we were invited to develop a proposal for phase 2, which began in August 2022.
Phase 1 involved working with over 60 growers ranging from conventional field scale vegetable, orchard and glasshouse growers to agroecological urban and peri-urban gardens, CSAs and herb producers. Through a combination of co-design and testing, we developed a range of tools including the Growing the Goods Catalogue (GtG), a payment system to incentivise public goods delivery and a spreadsheet based land management plan (LMP) template. We also worked with GIS company The Land App to help growers to display their LMPs on maps and compared traditional taught workshops with peer to peer learning, as different ways of sharing knowledge.
In Phase 2 we carried out stakeholder interviews to explore the impact of horticulture on the environment, focussing particularly on water, biodiversity and soil, and used the results to further improve the GtG catalogue. Aided by 12 growers, we co-designed two horticultural Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) standards – one for market gardens and one for orchards. We are now testing the whole set of tools with groups of growers in three parts of England – Peri-urban growers near Bristol, non-traditional growers in Cumbria, and fruit growers in Kent. In September 2023 we will test the tools with field scale vegetable growers, to find out how to make E.L.M.S. more attractive and accessible for short term tenants. Phase 2 will continue until July 2024
Reports of Growing the Good
Interim Reports are prepared every few months by Rebecca and her team to feed results back to Defra, so they can integrate the trial findings into the development of the ELMS national pilot. Please contact one of the LWA project officers for more details of the trial or to read the interim reports