From Fields to Landscapes
- Taskscape Associates
- Mar 24
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 25
A webinar exploring how collaborative farming can deliver beneficial outcomes ...
On March 26th, 2025, the James Hutton Institute hosted a lunchtime webinar organised by its International Land Use Study Centre (ILUSC), chaired by Director Professor Lee-Ann Sutherland alongside Deputy Director Dr Kerry Waylen. Four project speakers presented findings from across FRAMEwork's 11 clusters in nine European countries, then opened the floor for a wide-ranging discussion.
"From Fields to Landscapes: Farmer Clusters in Action Across Europe" brought together stakeholders to examine what happens when farmers stop working in isolation and start coordinating biodiversity action at the landscape scale.
Farmers across Europe already do a great deal for biodiversity: planting hedgerows, sowing wildflower strips, reducing tillage. But these actions, taken farm by farm, rarely add up to recovery at the landscape scale that biodiversity and ecosystem services desperately need. Farmer clusters, groups of neighbouring landholders who coordinate conservation across their shared landscape, offer a way to close that gap.
The webinar drew on five years of evidence and experiences from the Horizon 2020 FRAMEwork project to explore how clusters work in practice, what they achieve, and what it would take to make them a lasting part of agricultural policy.
Speakers:
Dr Graham Begg Senior Research Leader and Head of the Agroecology Group, James Hutton Institute. Coordinator of the FRAMEwork project.
Dr Rachel Nichols Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT). Background in agri-environment scheme options for wild bees and insect pollinators; spent three years on FRAMEwork focusing on farm cluster sustainability.
Professor Iris Bohnet Freelance Researcher and Consultant; formerly at CSIRO Australia and the Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, where she led the Czech team on FRAMEwork.
Dr Claudio Petucco Lead R&T Scientist, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). Specialises in ecosystem services assessment, biodiversity and sustainability modelling.
The Problem: Why Good Intentions Don't Add Up
Individual farm actions matter, but ecology operates at a scale that individual farms can't positvely manage alone.
Dr Begg opened by tracing biodiversity loss in farmland to two interlocking processes. The first is simplification: diverse habitats have given way to uniform cropping systems, removing ecological niches and the species that depend on them. The second is intensification: rising inputs and mechanisation have stripped away in-field resources and put growing pressure on natural populations.
Farmers already take a range of actions to counter this: hedgerows, beetle banks, wildflower strips, cover cropping, reduced tillage. These make a difference locally, but they remain piecemeal. Plants and animals rely on movement and dispersal across networks of connected habitats spanning multiple farms. Scattered, uncoordinated measures on individual holdings rarely accumulate into meaningful landscape-level change.
Agri-environment schemes have helped, but their impacts have been patchy. Most are structured farm by farm, are short-term and administratively demanding, and don't target the landscape-scale processes that underpin ecological recovery. As Dr Begg put it, no single farm practice or policy instrument can solve a problem that is fundamentally collective.
There are precedents that show coordinated approaches work. In England, farmer clusters have brought groups of landholders together around shared conservation priorities. In the Netherlands, farmers can only apply for agri-environment schemes collectively. In Australia and New Zealand, community-based initiatives such as Landcare and Green Waipara have restored habitats at landscape scale. FRAMEwork set out to develop and test a model for making this kind of collective action practical and replicable across Europe.
How Farmer Clusters Work in Practice
The UK-born model was trialled across nine countries, with a facilitator, farmer-chosen goals, and a wider network holding each cluster together.
Origins in the UK
Dr Nichols from GWCT, the organisation that originated the farmer cluster model, explained the approach. Farmer clusters are groups of neighbouring farmers who agree to work collaboratively to improve biodiversity across their shared landscape. The concept dates to 2010, when a nature improvement area in England happened to be farmer-led. Clusters now cover over 450,000 hectares of UK farmland.
What a cluster looks like on the ground
As part of FRAMEwork, 11 clusters were established across nine European countries, spanning arable and mixed farms, organic operations, vineyards, orchards and grasslands. Group sizes ranged from three to over 20 farms, covering anywhere from a few acres to roughly 10,000 hectares.
Each cluster identified its own conservation goals through a bottom-up process, rather than a government-imposed set of targets. Some focused on recovering a declining species; others on protecting waterways, introducing integrated pest management, creating wildlife habitat, or improving soil quality. What mattered was that the goals were chosen and agreed by the farmers themselves, then coordinated across the cluster.
The role of the facilitator
The facilitator emerged as the linchpin. Each cluster had one, typically someone with expertise in farmland conservation, biodiversity monitoring or agri-environment schemes. They organised events, brought farmers together, tailored advice to individual farms, and handled administrative coordination. Without facilitation, Dr Nichols noted, clusters struggle to gain momentum or turn ambitions into action.
The project also produced freely available tools and resources: FEAST, a decision-support tool from the University of Hertfordshire for modelling how repositioning semi-natural habitats could benefit target species; monitoring guidelines to help clusters track progress and give farmers tangible evidence of their efforts; and Landscape Leaders, a training course building facilitator skills in farmer engagement, biodiversity monitoring and project planning.
Beyond the farm gate
Clusters sit within a much wider network. In Luxembourg, a local cider company used apples from the cluster to sell its product at a premium, making the cluster financially viable through a supply-chain connection. Community engagement also played a role: bioblitz events, citizen science monitoring, wildlife photography workshops and school farm visits helped build public support and embed clusters in the places where they operate. As Dr Nichols put it: "This wasn't just a bunch of farms initiating uncoordinated agri-environment schemes. This was a whole community working towards a goal collaboratively."
See inside the project's Luxembourg Farmer Cluster
Learning from our Clusters: Maturity, Identity and Incentives
No two clusters followed the same path, and the differences reveal what enables and blocks collective action.
Comparing development pathways
Professor Bohnet presented a comparative analysis involving all 11 clusters. The researchers adopted five success criteria: achievement of social, environmental and economic goals, plus durability and acceptance. They also identified five formative dimensions that shape how a cluster develops: governance, leadership, facilitation, in-group characteristics, and context (biophysical, cultural, historical).
The English cluster reached high maturity relatively quickly, benefiting from established governance structures, existing agri-environment schemes and an experienced facilitation network. The Italian cluster, comprising organic and hobby olive growers with divergent values, struggled to establish governance or agree biodiversity targets, despite skilled facilitation. In the Czech Republic, a post-socialist context meant neighbouring farmers had little tradition of collaboration; ultimately an organic farming pioneer from the 1990s was the one who got the cluster going.
These are snapshots in time, Professor Bohnet emphasised. The maturity framework proved useful not just for comparison, but as a reflective tool. Presenting the "kite diagrams" back to each cluster prompted honest discussion about what was realistically achievable within a five-year project.
A shift in identity
The farmer interviews yielded a further insight that Professor Bohnet described as often overlooked in policy. Collaboration within clusters fostered a deeper, more lasting engagement with biodiversity. It changed how farmers saw themselves and each other, shifting from isolated action to socially embedded learning communities. This identity shift may itself be a powerful lever for policy, suggesting that EU funding should extend beyond environmental measures to cover the social infrastructure of facilitation and peer learning that drives behavioural change.
Economic experiments conducted outside the clusters supported this. They confirmed that clusters offer practical advantages for implementing collective result-based schemes, but depend heavily on trust and on farmers choosing to join rather than being compelled to.
Modelling, Sustainability and the Bigger Picture
Systems modelling and a streamlined assessment tool translate cluster experience into something policymakers and practitioners can act on.
Simulating policy scenarios
Dr Petucco from LIST brought a systems-modelling perspective. The team mapped each cluster's socio-ecological network, capturing relationships between farmers, ecological entities, and flows of knowledge. They then built an agent-based model simulating how collective outcomes emerge from individual decisions. Virtual farmers in a virtual landscape gradually adopt practices such as flower strips, field margins and hedgerows; the model tracks how these changes affect ecosystem service indicators including pollination, pest control, erosion and soil carbon.
The model also captures social dynamics. One indicator measured the risk of farmers abandoning the cluster under different policy scenarios. Simulations without subsidies led to the highest abandonment levels, a clear signal that policy needs to underpin the social infrastructure of collaboration, not just fund environmental practices. In practical terms, this means a cluster designer or policymaker can test whether a proposed incentive structure is likely to hold a group together before committing resources.
Tracking sustainability across dimensions
An initial set of 35 sustainability indicators covering environmental, economic and social dimensions was streamlined to 15 questions with a traffic-light scoring system after survey fatigue set in. Radar charts for each cluster revealed distinct sustainability profiles: strengths in some areas, clear gaps in others. The tool is designed to support discussion within clusters, helping facilitators and lead farmers reflect on progress, identify priorities, and structure conversations with stakeholders.
Discussion: Size, Markets and the Long Game
The Q&A covered questions that matter for anyone thinking about replicating or supporting clusters.
Should every country support farmer clusters? Dr Begg's view was unequivocal. Having observed the benefits of collective action across five years and many different cultural and farming contexts, he saw no meaningful downside. What matters is that facilitation is funded. "If every country offers a scheme that would support facilitation, I think the degree of uptake would be large."
What's the right group size? The panel converged on roughly 10 as a useful benchmark, with five as a practical minimum. Below that, losing even one member threatens viability. Larger groups of 20 or more can work, but need more elaborate governance. The English cluster at Cranborne Chase had around 22 farms with a steering group of about 10 farmers; the large North East Cotswolds cluster runs with its own director, two facilitators and a communications function.
Did markets and private finance play a role? The Luxembourg cluster stood out: a 'B-Corp' cider company acted as a lead farm and aggregator, hosting meetings and differentiating its business through the cluster's activities. More broadly, green finance interest was limited; the project found it was still too early for this to feature consistently.
How to make clusters sustainable long-term? Dr Begg argued that collective landscape-scale action should be treated as a foundational layer of agricultural policy, not a scheme that comes and goes. Professor Bohnet pointed to the value of embedding supply-chain actors with a genuine interest in sustainable production. Dr Petucco emphasised stewardship, the sense among participating farmers of opening their land and sharing their experience with the wider community, as a binding force that held clusters together.
Key Takeaways
Five years of cross-European research point to some clear lessons:
Facilitation is the non-negotiable. Clusters without a skilled facilitator struggle to form, hold together, or translate goals into action. Funding facilitation should be a policy priority, not an optional extra.
Context shapes everything. There is no single template. A cluster in post-socialist Czech Republic faces different barriers from one in the English Cotswolds. The maturity assessment framework offers a practical way to gauge where a cluster is and what it can realistically achieve.
Identity matters as much as incentives. Working collectively changed how farmers saw themselves and their role. This shift, from individual land manager to part of a landscape-scale community, may be one of the most durable outcomes, and one that conventional policy rarely targets.
Supply chains can anchor clusters. Where a buyer, processor or retailer has a stake in biodiversity-friendly production, clusters gain financial resilience and a reason to persist beyond the life of any single funding programme.
Policy should treat collective action as infrastructure, not as a scheme. A standing facilitation fund, rather than time-limited project funding, would support not just biodiversity but a range of sustainability objectives, and give clusters the long-term horizon they need.
Engagement and Impact
Following promotion via Hutton and Taskscape, the event attracted over 40 attendees. The project team would like to thank event chair Professor Lee-Ann Sutherland, question moderator Dr Kerry Waylen, and all contributors for an informative and candid session.
A recording of this webinar will be made available on the ILUSC webpage of the James Hutton Institute site and the FRAMEwork project's YouTube channel.
If you enjoyed this webinar, or reading about it, you may want to check out previous webinars on similar topics: Halting Biodiversity Decline - Policy and Practice and 'Inside Farmer Clusters: Lessons from Europe and the UK'.
Curious about ILUSC's big-picture thinking? You can read an interview with Professor Lee-Ann Sutherland on the project's Substack.
