Farmer Nature Reporting - Understanding your farm’s Nature Reporting metrics

What is it?

This metric summarises the proportion of your farm dedicated to biodiversity-positive habitats (definition here). These habitats are those that are more likely to provide resources for a range of native species. They are habitats that are less disturbed than more heavily managed areas such as those receiving inputs, heavy grazing, cultivation, or felling.

Why does it matter?

Habitat cover is a widely used target across a number of schemes and certifications. For example, the Sustainable Farming Scheme in Wales requires farmers to have at least 10% habitat cover.

Furthermore, diverse habitats across the farm can be an excellent way to support your farm resilience in a sustainable way. Hedges and lines of trees can provide diverse browse and shade for livestock, meadows and flower-margins provide habitat for species that can support Integrated Pest Management and pollination, and ponds, scrapes, woodlands and scrub can help regulate the flow of water across the farm helping reduce the impacts of flooding and drought.

Increasing habitat cover can be a straightforward aim to improve and communicate a farm’s impact on biodiversity. Increasing habitat cover gives nature more space to thrive alongside your farm operations. This means more - and more diverse - birds, bugs, and plants.

How can you impact this metric?

This metric can be increased by establishing new areas of any biodiversity-positive habitats. These range from short-term habitats such as species-rich leys to more permanent habitats like broadleaved woodlands. The best way to improve your score will depend on your unique context.

It is recommended to evaluate habitat cover alongside other metrics such as connectivity and habitat diversity in order to evaluate the locations where increasing habitat cover is likely to provide the greatest benefits.

What is it?

Your connectivity score is the total area of your connected habitats (<20m apart) divided by the total area of your habitats.

Why does it matter?

Greater habitat connectivity can improve the resilience of your farm by enabling more diverse, and often beneficial, species to move across your holding. This provides services such as pollination and Integrated Pest Management.

Increasing your connectivity is an excellent way to improve your impact on biodiversity without removing substantial areas from production. These areas provide corridors for biodiversity and help with crop protection and pollination.

Species across your farm rely on varying areas of habitats and the resources these provide to feed, hibernate, mate, and raise young. These behaviours become impossible if the areas of suitable habitats are small and fragmented or surrounded by areas of impassable or inhospitable habitats for the species.

How can you impact this metric?

Planting margins and buffers is a great way to improve your connectivity. An example of this is shown in the map above.

Thinking about any areas of your fields that are shady, wet, steep or unproductive can help with choosing where to place connecting habitats.

Which habitats you choose to plant depends on your farm.

Beetle banks, flower margins and semi-natural grasslands can be great in arable or horticultural fields where post control and pollination can help stabilise yields (Redhead et al. 2020).

If you’re grazing livestock, shelter belts and other types of agroforestry can be a great way to connect habitats and provide shade, shelter and browse for your animals.

Alternatively, including biodiversity positive habitats in your crop rotations can increase your farm’s connectivity. Adding herbal leys into your rotation ensures that field links surrounding habitats whilst also improving your soil health.

What is it?

The proportion of your cropland that has “green cover” between the months of November and January is divided by the total area of your cropland. This “green cover” can be winter cropping, grasses or any other kind of plant cover.

Why does it matter?

Cover cropping can increase the yield and quality or your following crop (Holland et al. 2021. Grant and funding schemes can help you with the costs of establishing cover crops.

A survey of 117 farmers using cover crops found that farmers “observed benefits to soil structure, soil erosion control and water infiltration in addition to reductions in the use of chemical fertilisers, herbicide and fuel use.” Many farmers also observed increased yield in crops planted after cover cropping (Storr et al. 2019).

By helping to reduce your chemical and fertiliser use, cover throughout the winter months can help to reduce your costs, whilst also improving yields and yield stability. The plant cover also improves how water can be absorbed by your soils helping to reduce crop damage during heavy rainfall.

If you graze livestock on your farm, winter cover can also provide an additional source of grazing for your animals during winter months. The improved soil structure can also help with field drainage meaning many farmers find they can graze their animals for more of the year.

Increasing your soil cover during winter months also helps biodiversity across your farm by providing habitat and resources for local species during winter months.

The ground cover can also help to improve the impact your cropping has on the climate by reducing carbon emissions that occur when soil is left bare and by increasing carbon storage in the leaves and roots of the plant cover.

Reducing chemical and fertiliser use doesn’t just help your farm business, it also means there is less risk that these chemicals make their way into the environment. What’s more, the additional soil cover and plant roots help to hold your soil and fertility in the field. This helps to reduce runoff and erosion.

How can you impact this metric?

A common way to increase your score will be to bring cover crops into your crop rotations. Another option is to add leys or grasses into your crop rotations to increase the number of years where your fields have continuous cover.

Schemes such as SFI can be a great way to access support for planting cover crops.

What is it?

This metric indicates the proportion of your productive land that is close enough to biodiversity-positive habitats for potentially beneficial species such as pollinators and pest predators to spread. These species play an important role in Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

The metric is calculated by dividing the area of your cropland within 45 metres of a habitat by the total area of cropland on your farm.

The metric is based on research that there is an estimated 45m spillover of pest control and pollination services into productive land from habitats such as flower-margins (Woodcock et al. 2016).

All productive land within 45m of these habitats contributes positively to the score by increasing the proportion of land that benefits from the spread of these services. This is based on the work by Woodcock, et al. 2016.

Why does it matter?

Natural pest control and pollination are important services that can help you to reduce your costs and crop losses.

Natural pest control can reduce your risk of crop loss and dependence on spraying. This can lower your costs and exposure to potential future restrictions on chemical applications. Similarly, increasing pollinator-spread across your farm can improve the performance of certain crops.

Research has found that in crops such as wheat natural pest control is higher closer to flower-rich margins (Woodcock, et al 2016). This can increase the crop’s resilience to pest outbreaks helping you to avoid costly losses or additional spraying. Floral field margins have been shown to be especially beneficial for reducing crop damage in nearby crops (Crowther et al. 2023).

Woodcock et al. (2016) showed that crops relying on pollination (such as oil seed rape) have greater yields when more pollinators are present. Ensuring all crops are close to pollinator habitats can help improve your yields.

The species that benefit your crops also play an important role in local ecosystems as they help pollinate wild species and provide a food source for other animals. The marginal habitats also help to provide corridors of habitats for a range of other species.

How can you impact this metric?

All biodiversity-positive habitats can contribute to this score. Increasing the use of margins, headlands, and difficult-to-manage corners for biodiversity-positive habitats is a great way to increase your score without taking substantial areas out of productive management.

What is it?

The metric calculates the proportion of your cropped land or modified grassland that lies within 12m of a watercourse.

Why does it matter?

The buffer zones around water bodies are high-priority areas for protection and habitat restoration. Taking these often difficult-to-manage buffer strips out of production tends to have less impact on farm profitability than other areas, whilst agri-environment payment options are often available to support these actions.

Keeping clear buffers can also help to ensure compliance across your farm by reducing runoff risk from grazing, spraying and fertilising.

Cropping and modified grassland within 12m of a watercourse can increase the risk of runoff which can contribute to water pollution. In contrast, biodiversity-positive habitats, especially more densely vegetated habitats, that you have along watercourses slow the rate of runoff and reduce pollution risk.

Buffered watercourses can also provide natural corridors for a range of species to travel across landscapes, which also improves habitat connectivity. These buffer zones also help to reduce the erosion of river banks, change river flows, and improve habitats within rivers aiding biodiversity and fish populations.

How can you impact this metric?

Cropped land and modified grassland within 12m of a watercourse will impact this score. Considering whether productive management of these areas is vital to your farm business is important. Reducing these areas that are managed productively, fencing them off (to enable vegetation to grow), and establishing scrub or woodlands will help to improve this score and your farm's impacts on water quality.