The Marden Farmer Cluster

As a result of a chance meeting with neighbour Lou Carpenter in the spring of 2020 coinciding with the announcement of complex new land management agreements for England’s farmers, our debate about the delivery of The Government’s ambitious Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) was timely.

ELMS was designed by The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) as a system to replace the EU area based payments previously received by farmers via the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Unlike the CAP which was delivered on an area basis, ELMS was to be based on the principal of ‘Public Money for Public Good’ and broke the delivery of the proposed schemes down into three layers. The Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI) would represent the entry level whereby all farmers could access payments that rewarded the societal benefits delivered above and beyond that of producing food. The SFI was to be based on the principles of improving soil, air and water quality as well as restoring lost or damaged biodiversity. The second level would encompass myriad Higher and Mid-Tier Schemes (HTS and MTS) that would continuously evolve but would be fundamentally more complex and site specific in recognising local ecological variations and priorities. The third level, and The Holy Grail for DEFRA, was Landscape Scale Recovery;  this is where Lou and I saw an opportunity for a loose association of our farming friends and neighbours.

A few short months later and with the help and support of Kent Wildlife Trust, The Marden Farmer Cluster was born. An informal group, initially just a handful of members which by January 2024 numbered 26 farmers working over 3500 hectares of pretty much contiguous land around Marden, it stretches across the catchments of rivers Beult and Lesser Teise to the Low Weald floodplain. Unbothered by farm size, aspiration or conservation experience of the individual members The Cluster is fully focussed on enlightened self-help and mutual encouragement, nurturing an excellent working relationship with DEFRA’s teams at Natural England and maximising the financial and environmental benefits that only such joined-up thinking and action can deliver.

The Low Weald was, historically, clothed by the great forest known to the Romans as Anderida, and, as a result of the miles of post-enclosure immovable hedge-lined ditches and waterways, remains the most complete medieval landscape in northern Europe. This patchwork of meadow, woodland, orchard and cultivated field has retained a shape recognisable from tithe maps hundreds of years old and as such provides, to name the most visible only, a home to a vast array of birds, plants, insects and fungi; you name it, if you look hard enough, we still have it. We know this because Marden is blessed with an army of amateur enthusiasts; their scientific knowledge and expertise encompasses any phylum that you might care to mention and they are Marden Wildlife.