Extension service provision facilitating landscape-scale nature recoveryProject

Context and rationale

Different landscapes present a series of varying physical and social challenges to nature recovery, resulting in efforts requiring localised and targeted approaches. The UK Government Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) initiative represents one such approach for providing strategic catchment-scale farm advice. The initiative predominantly focuses on mitigating agricultural water pollution but there is potential to expand the CSF’s remit to facilitate farmer collaborations and deliver further landscape-scale nature recovery. With the Government’s Landscape Recovery Scheme roll-out, this project contributes crucial evidence to inform effective policy by answering the following research questions:

What are the current niches of different organisations providing farm advice (also known as extension services) in facilitating landscape-scale nature recovery?
What and where do gaps in advice provision exist?
How can agri-environmental policy best support agricultural advice for nature recovery?

Activities and outputs

We conducted qualitative and statistical analysis of data collected through semi-structured interviews gathered during winter 2022/23 from 133 farm advisors across government, industry, and non-profit organisations in England.

The two project outputs are:

• Technical Report containing details of our analytical framework to examine existing advice provision.
• Policy Briefing summarising results from applying the analytical framework to our interview data at the regional and national scale to compare advisory niches of different sector organisations for nature recovery.