LENs contracts for 2024 are in the final stages of being signed, with practices set to be implemented in the UK and Europe over the coming months. The year is proving to be a huge success, with a significant expansion in the number of practices funded and implemented, the hectares we will positively impact, and the number of partners involved in each of the LENs programmes.
This article looks at the success of this year, ahead of Trade 2025 launching later this autumn.
Introduction: the LENs trading year
Each autumn, we open the ‘trade’ for the coming year. A trade is the term we use to describe the annual process of: mapping demand-side sustainability needs and the land management practices that could meet them; working with supply aggregators to bring in farms (and other land enterprises) who want to implement those practices; and contracting between the partners. There are many steps in this process but when we talk about ‘Trade 2024’, we’re referring to the entire cycle from identifying needs to implementing practices on the land.
Why LENs?
Healthy and productive landscapes underpin the long-term resilience of the economy, livelihoods and biodiversity. Our mission is to regenerate the landscapes on which businesses, communities and nature depend.
Our food systems and our natural environment are under immense pressure – from extreme weather events such as drought and flooding, emerging pests and diseases, reductions in biodiversity, and degraded soils.
Businesses that rely on landscapes, for a supply of crops or clean water for instance, cannot succeed if the environments that produce them fail to thrive. Ensuring the health and productivity of local landscapes is right at the heart of making sure a supply chain is resilient.
Collaboration is vital. A business acting alone will struggle to make an impact because what is needed in a particular geography will go beyond the boundaries of any given farm.
Trade 2024: the most successful LENs year to date
This collaborative model is growing in scale and impact. For 2024, we have five active Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENs). In two regions in the UK (Yorkshire and East of England), and in Italy, Hungary and Poland, more than 300 farms and vineyards are set to implement regenerative farming practices that will impact more than 45,000 hectares of land. We have attracted over €12.5 million (around £10.5 million) to make this happen, from 14 partners including Nestlé Purina, Cereal Partners, Diageo and PepsiCo.
This is a significant expansion on 2023, when we had four active regions, with 10 partners investing €8 million in 133 farms, with just over 18,000 hectares of land positively impacted.
What is being funded in 2024?
The most common land management issues that LENs addresses in a given region are: improving the resilience of crop production; increasing soil health and soil organic carbon; mitigating flood risks; meeting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets; increasing biodiversity; and improving water quality.
In total, there are 50+ different land management practices that funders are investing in across our regions to meet those needs. Among the most popular are:
- Adopting reduced cultivation systems. By minimising soil disturbance, this encourages greater soil organic matter, preserves good soil structural stability and its ability to hold water and is beneficial for soil biological activity. This helps deeper plant root penetration for better access to water and nutrients, leading to more stable yields in challenging conditions, like drought.
- Planting cover crops to: reduce nutrient loss; improve soil fertility; reduce nitrate leaching; improve soil structure; counteract compaction; help protect soils from erosion; and provide short-term suppression of weeds. A year-long fallow with cover crops offers greater scope to introduce seed mixes with multiple benefits and reduces the need for pesticides and fertiliser.
- Sowing herbaceous species and wildflowers at the edge of arable fields or vineyards to provide habitat for pollinating insects. These uncultivated areas can also provide habitats for predatory insects that contribute to pest control in the field. Grass and flower strips also act as buffers to help reduce the amount of sediment and nutrients lost to runoff.
- Integrating manure, compost and other organic fertilisers to substitute synthetic fertiliser, to reduce the risk of leaching and carbon emissions from fertilisation, as synthetic fertilisers are often the top contributor to an arable farm’s carbon footprint. Manure and compost can also help increase soil biology, structure and fertility.
LENs works alongside other support schemes available to farmers, and the list of land management practices available in LENs changes each year. This is to ensure we complement governmental schemes such as SFI in England and the CAP ecoschemes in EU countries.
What did LENs achieve in 2023?
Below is a summary of practices across the LENs programmes active in 2023 in multiple regions across the UK, Italy, Hungary and Poland. The table shows the total area of each measure implemented, the number of farms implementing each measure.
On average LENs farmers were awarded contracts worth €45,000 to implement a package of measures. This is a significant reward for farmers, supporting their individual pathways to regenerative farming. Up to a third of these farms received funding from more than one demand partner – this is paving the way for great cost-sharing and further guaranteeing the viability of the LENs model.
From the 130+ farms enrolled in 2023 trades, multiple practices are being applied to 18,000 hectares of farmland – covering arable fields, pastures, fallow and field margins.
Farmers chose a combination of practices that suit their needs best, with most trialling a reduction of fertiliser and minimum tillage. One of the novelties of LENs is also to let farmers propose their own tailored practices if not already listed in the technical guide. These “farmer innovations” are well liked by farmers, with close to 5,000 hectares worth of innovation practices being rolled out in 2023-2024. These included intercropping, companion cropping, acquiring direct drill machinery and attending regenerative agriculture training opportunities.
Measuring impact
This year, we carried out our first complete round of Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV), collecting evidence on every farm participating in LENs. We compiled a detailed environmental profile of each farm and estimated the expected outcomes from LENs. This information provides a good idea of the starting point of each farm, and from then onwards we can start to see whether practices on farm are having an impact. In 2024, we will revisit these farms and measure the actual changes in environmental outcomes.
We also finalised our first detailed MRV Protocol, which documents the technical basis and methodologies used for measuring our impact. The Protocol has been externally reviewed by independent scientists specialised in environmental measurement and carbon accounting.
LENs measures impact across six environmental outcome areas: soil health, emissions reductions, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water quality and flood risk management. The practices funded through LENs are known to be beneficial across multiple outcome areas. Our measurement programme will help track changes year on year against these outcomes and start to understand how they interact to provide wider landscape resilience.
LENs types of practices | Total hectares on which practices are carried out | 2023 practice adoption by farms in LENs | Soil Health | Emissions reductions | Carbon sequestration | Biodiversity and habitats | Water Quality | Flood Risk |
Reduce use of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides | 10,630 | 43% | High | High | High | |||
Minimise soil disturbance through reduced tillage | 10,070 | 47% | High | High | High | High | High | High |
Improve soil cover and plant diversity | 5,340 | 59% | High | High | High | High | High | |
Integrate livestock | 163 | 5% | High | High | ||||
Improve wildlife habitats | 7 | 4% | High | |||||
Woodland and hedgerow planting or restoring | 50 | 26% | High | High | High | High | High |
Importantly, our data can be used by farmers and provides meaningful insights for future land management decisions. Our first year of data collection helped understand the starting position of farmers while acknowledging their wide-ranging climate and soil conditions and other local context.
This data is provided to farmers at a much more granular level – enabling them to see, for instance, the predominant emissions sources per crop in the rotation as well as their initial soil organic matter levels. These will guide farmers in future planning and funding available via LENs.