Cymraeg The Defra Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) trial to map, assess and improve delivery of public goods in the English horticulture sector.
LWA Project Officers: Rebecca Laughton 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
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.
Phase 2
In Phase 2 we researched the impact of horticulture on the environment, focussing particularly on water, biodiversity and soil.The results were used to further improve the GtG catalogue and co-design, with 12 growers, two horticultural Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) standards – one for market gardens and one for orchards. We tested the whole set of tools with three groups of growers – Peri-urban growers near Bristol, non-traditional growers in Cumbria, and fruit growers in Kent.
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.
