With this in mind, it feels like a fitting moment to return to a farm we visited in 2024 to talk about wetlands and natural flood management. I sat down with Kate Henderson, who manages day-to-day cropping and land planning at FarmED, to talk through how their Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) agreement has evolved, and what water resilience looks like in practice on a farm learning to plan for both ends of the weather extremes.
FarmED’s SFI journey
FarmED has made its home at Honeydale Farm since 2013, a 107-acre demonstration farm in the Cotswolds which seeks to act as a living textbook of regenerative farming. Kate joined the team in 2022, not long after the farm began using Land App, and now works closely alongside FarmED’s director Ian Wilkinson on cropping plans and day-to-day land management.
Despite its modest footprint, Honeydale’s SFI journey has become surprisingly intricate. The farm entered SFI at the beginning of last year, covering the entire property. Since then, the lower half has moved into Landscape Recovery, as part of the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project – a farmer-led effort by the North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster now recognised as the UK’s largest nature recovery scheme of its kind, spanning over 50 farms and more than 3,000 hectares across the Cotswolds. The upper half remains under SFI, supporting a mosaic of low-input crops, wildflower margins, herbal leys, and agroforestry, much of it organised into two-acre plots, each with its own management and purpose.
Honeydale Farm as mapped on Land App © FarmED
“Our SFI application is more complex because we’ve got so many different projects running side by side,” Kate explains. “We’ve divided fields into two-acre sections, each managed differently.” It’s here that Land App proved invaluable. “Land App was really useful when we were applying, because we could make sure we’d measured out everything properly.”
Importantly, none of these systems were designed in Land App to begin with. The herbal leys, crop rotations, and agroforestry strips (some planted back in 2022) all predate the SFI application. Instead, they’ve developed gradually season by season through trial and adaptation.
“Things have evolved over the years. It’s been a slow evolution, I’d say.”
Land App’s contribution has been to measure, formalise, and communicate their working system, which is already thriving on the ground. For a demonstration farm like FarmED, this act of communication is as crucial as the mapping itself. With around 35,000 visitors each year, FarmED regularly uses their plans and maps built on Land App to showcase the farm at a glance, for instance, by replacing what Kate calls “a standard map with a beige background” on the big screen during workshops. Those same maps now support everything from kitchen garden rental agreements to keeping staff up to date with vital infrastructure like water points.
Honeydale Farm buildings © FarmED
Reading the land in a different season
Inevitably, our conversation turned to water, and to the same natural flood management system at the heart of our last visit — the ponds and channels built to slow the flow of floodwater off the hills and protect the village below. This year, those lower ponds have dried out, just as they did in the hot summer of 2022. It’s a striking illustration of how quickly conditions can shift on a single piece of land, with infrastructure built for one kind of extreme now being read for signs of another.
FarmED’s response has been practical and hands-on. A borehole was installed this year to supply the farm’s kitchen garden, after the team judged that drawing water from the stream to supplement the mains was no longer the right approach. Kate’s team has also been hand-watering young agroforestry trees, which she explains is a more hands-on style of management than the farm would normally need, and one that reflects just how closely conditions are now being watched.
So how should a farm think about water when the extremes keep swinging further apart? “It’s very topical, isn’t it?” Kate reflects. “A lot of farmers are talking about that… do you build ponds and reservoirs? Do you have boreholes? Or do you just try and get your soils to a point where they can hold a lot more water?“
Kate is candid that the farm hasn’t yet turned to Land App’s hydrology and flow-pathway layers, but that doing so is now firmly on her mind, as the team looks to build on the natural flood management system already in place.
“Anything that can help us visually see what’s there, and what we’ve got to work with, is really helpful.”
Pond creation at FarmED © FarmED
A farm still being written
When asked what excites her most about the future, Kate doesn’t hesitate: “Food and water, basically.” For Kate, food means not just what the farm grows, but how nutritious and for whom. Water, meanwhile, is just as central. In only a few years, FarmED has learned to navigate both sides of the climate extremes, from implementing natural flood management measures needed to slow the flow, to now considering drought-tolerant tree species in response to increasingly dry conditions. Rather than being a farm under pressure, it is evident that FarmED is a farm attuned to its very environment and actively adapting to the serious challenges we are facing.
Land App’s role has grown in step with these changes. And as conversations in agriculture shift ever more towards resilience, from both business and biodiversity ends, FarmED’s complex SFI agreement and ongoing work with water serve as a reminder that the real work of building a regenerative farming system is continuous, always evolving with the seasons and the needs of the land.
