Grazing For Good: Locally-led, independent research to support enhanced landscape-scale agri-environment practices in the Lake District fells.

On Monday (12th January), NSA hosted an all-day event at Rheged, Penrith, Cumbria, to hear farmer experiences on the current grazing regimes across the Lake District and surrounding areas and gather feedback on what needs to be done to ensure hill sheep farming businesses remain viable. 

NSA Project Manager Nicola Noble says: “The farmer session in the morning was an ideal opportunity for those farming in the hills and uplands to share their lived in experiences without any fear to their land tenure or participation in environmental schemes. The key points raised were concerns over blanket grazing prescriptions where pockets of sensitive habitats exist, the misidentification of habitat types, whether winter off grazing is considered in stocking rate prescriptions and the urgent need for agri-environmental schemes to be bespoke and flexible.”

The afternoon workshop was part of the Grazing for Good project, where the steering group (composed of local farmers, industry and government organisations) met with the four world-leading experts specifically selected for this project to bring their extensive knowledge covering the wide range of public goods delivered by sheep farming in these sensitive areas - ecology, the environment, social and economic cultures in the hills/uplands, tourism etc. 

Nicola continues: “The Lake District fells are a highly designated, culturally and biologically unique landscape, where a one-size-fits-all prescription for land management risks unintended social and ecological harm. This project will provide the local, multi-disciplinary evidence base needed to design fair, effective agri-environment interventions targeted to this location.”

The first phase of the Grazing for Good project will be complete by the end of March, with wider NSA input to utilise the knowledge gathered to extend the range of this work to cover the hills and uplands in other areas across the UK. 

The Grazing for Good project was initiated by the Herdwick Sheep Breeders Association, Federation of Cumbria Commoners and West Lakeland CIC, and is now supported and project-managed by NSA, made possible through donations from local agricultural organisations and FiPL funding from the Lake District National Park.