Through Waitrose’s Farming for Nature programme, Dovecote Park is equipping their farmers with Land App maps, information and expert advice to help them tackle the challenges they face. Land App’s Nature, Risk and Resilience Reporting now supports 365 Dovecote Park farmers, giving them an efficient way to understand their farms, manage applications, and plan for the future.
Dovecote Park is one of over 40 food processors participating in the Waitrose Farming for Nature programme. We caught up with the Dovecote team to learn how the programme is helping Dovecote and their farmers tackle the challenges they face.
“This is a positive project because much of the current information on biodiversity and data is really confusing. Offering our farmers dedicated, knowledgeable support on this is undeniably beneficial.”– Chloe Bridgett, ESG and Agri Manager at Dovecote Park
Introduction to Dovecote Park
Dovecote Park is an award-winning business that supplies Waitrose with their high quality and welfare beef and venison. They’ve been going for over 25 years and employ over 1,000 staff.
Relationships and welfare are core to Dovecote Park. Many farmers supplying Dovecote Park have done so for generations; as Chloe put it, “they live and breathe Dovecote Park.” These relationships have been built on pride, trust and sector-leading welfare standards, and it is this foundation that the long-term relationship between the farmers, Dovecote Park, and Waitrose is built upon.
Modern farming, climate change, and political turbulence mean farmers are facing unprecedented challenges. Against this backdrop, the Farming for Nature programme is proving to be a timely source of support.
The need for information and tools to support farms
It’s clear the Dovecote team understands the looming challenges their farmers face. Droughts often directly follow floods and are compounded by spiking fertiliser costs, making farming ever more difficult. Everyone in Dovecote’s supply chain, from the farmers to Waitrose, needs to understand, plan, and act to tackle these challenges, but doing so is complicated, especially alongside the pressures of daily farming.
The Dovecote team described the ever-growing administrative burden faced by their farmers, “from a completely practical point of view, farming has never required more paperwork. Land App can break that paperwork barrier down.”
It’s not just day-to-day farm management that is becoming increasingly complex. As Chloe shared, “in an ever-changing sustainability environment, it’s getting harder to understand what should be done and where.” Finding time to meet current requirements and plan for the future is increasingly difficult for time-stretched farmers. Planning new grant applications; crop rotations to adapt to price changes; or management plans for improved water security all require considerable time, information, and expert advice.
Steps toward equipping farms for the future
A simplified staged approach:
Getting all Dovecote farmers access to this support hasn’t always been easy. Like most farmers, Dovecote’s growers have limited time for new, unfamiliar ventures, and many were hesitant to sign up for the hour-long advisory session initially on offer. So Land App worked closely with the Dovecote Park field team to adapt the approach, so farmers could sign up to the programme in mere minutes rather than committing to a lengthy session upfront.
By signing up, Dovecote Park farmers shared enough information for Land App to provide them all with accurate farm and habitat maps and access to free advisory support whenever it suits them best. All the plans and data are owned by the farmers, putting them in control of their own information and how it’s used.
Reducing the admin burden for Dovecote’s farmers:
Once completed, these plans are saved and can be shared, printed and edited whenever needed. With the advisory support Waitrose is funding, admin tasks such as grant applications, completing a farm habitat map, sharing a farm boundary, or building a Field Risk Map can be completed in minutes rather than hours.
Being set up on Land App also ensures that farmers only have to complete these tasks once, reducing the time spent on repetitive office-based tasks.
This benefit is already starting to materialise within Dovecote Park. Chloe explained how one farmer felt overwhelmed by the need to measure their hedgerows and that steering them towards their Land App maps gave them a pain-free way to get this otherwise time-consuming measurement.
Streamlining funding applications:
Nature Reporting maps, insights, and professional advice don’t just reduce the admin burden for farmers; they also make it easier to access public grants and private funding.
Through the project, Land App has been able to flag the opportunity for professional support with SFI funding applications to every eligible farmer, ensuring they don’t miss out and can produce high-quality applications that directly support their businesses
As Chloe put it, the project enables advice to be shared with farmers that clearly shows “this is where we might be able to do something and this is where a grant could help you. It then opens the door to further help, without pushing the farmer. I think this has real benefits.”
Similar approaches have been taken with private funding, with eligible farmers contacted directly by Waitrose and water companies. This has led farmers such as Richard Barker to receive £43,000 of private funding for actions to help reduce his flood risk during heavy rainfall (read the case study here).
It’s important to be realistic about the impact of this project. It isn’t a silver bullet that will yield huge returns in the first 6 months, but it does aim to steadily shift how farmers understand, share, and plan their management. And crucially, it enables them to do this in less time, freeing up more time to be in the field caring for their animals.
How Nature Reporting is supporting future planning and resilience for Dovecote Park
Dovecote Park, like Waitrose, knows their business depends on their farmers. What helps their farmers improve their management and plan for the future, helps their business remain resilient and profitable.
When discussing their nature risks and dependencies, the Dovecote team were most concerned about water. Back-to-back seasonal droughts and flooding impact many of their farmers. Weather like this reduces forage availability with cost and welfare implications. Herbal swards, tailored crop rotations, and changes to water management on farms can transform how farmers fare during these more extreme weather patterns.
Data from the Farming for Nature project can help Dovecote Park understand and support the kinds of risks their farmers face. It shows that their farmers have higher-than-average winter soil cover (helping to regulate water during heavy rainfall), but also that slightly higher-than-average proportions of Dovecote farms lie within areas of high flood risk. In fact, for some farms, 100% of their farmland falls within flood zones.
This data isn’t shared in a way that allows farms to be judged or ranked. Rather, it allows the farmers, their advisors, Dovecote, Waitrose and Land App to direct relevant guidance and opportunities to the farmers who need them most, as Chloe summed up:
“For our farmers to have the opportunity to see where their risks lie within their own business and be able to address them with an expert who can give them proper, trustworthy advice tailored to the risks on their farm…. in the next few years that’s going to be more fundamental than ever.”
This project also enables businesses like Dovecote Park to differentiate themselves. Dovecote and their farms pride themselves on high welfare standards, but they excel when it comes to the role their farms play in supporting biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.
When compared to data on the average UK livestock farm, dovecote farmers are providing more space in which biodiversity can thrive. Across Dovecote’s farms, nearly twice as much area has continuous green cover during the winter months. This is helping to keep soil and fertility on the farms.
The data also shows the rare and important habitats managed by Dovecote’s farmers. Their average distinctiveness score (based on Natural England’s BNG metric) is more than double the average. Grants and private payment schemes are often in place to support the conservation and improvements of these rare habitats, and this kind of data helps signpost farmers to opportunities as they become available.
The data also shines a light on opportunities for Dovecote’s farmers. Across the group, grant payments per ha are lower than average for livestock farms, which points to the potential to increase awareness and uptake.
Conclusion
Change is not easy, particularly when under pressure, yet farming is more complicated and more admin-intensive than ever before. Farmers need support to chart a course across this complex landscape.
With the support of the Waitrose Farming for Nature programme, Dovecote’s farmers are better placed to meet the demands of today and plan for the future. With expert advisors on hand to help with grants, certification and standards requirements, and forward planning, they don’t have to meet these demands alone. Perhaps more than anything, the programme is about strengthening relationships: giving Dovecote Park the tools to work more closely with their farmers, and reinforcing the trust Dovecote has built with Waitrose over the last 30 years.
This support and management improvements trickle upwards and make for more resilient supply chains. The team at Dovecote Park know this; it’s why they have such strong relationships with their farmers and sector-leading welfare standards. The Farming for Nature programme is the next step in enabling Dovecote Park to guide their farmers and their business into a more resilient and impactful future.
Are you a farmer supplying Waitrose? The Farming For Nature initiative is now live, and all farmers are eligible for a free 1:1 advisory session with a Land App Accredited Professional. To register interest, just fill out this short form and the Land App team will reach out with clear and simple next steps.
