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Webinar - Facilitating Farm Groups with Land App
Webinar - Facilitating Farm Groups with Land App
Simla Rees-Moorlah avatar
Written by Simla Rees-Moorlah
Updated over a week ago

Summary

  • This webinar is about "Facilitating Farm Groups with Land App."

  • This webinar focuses on the main features and functions to help participants be part of a farm group or facilitate a group of farms including "Map of Maps" designed for facilitation and farm groups

Transcript

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's training webinar with the Land App. I'm Dan Geerah, the Innovation and Partnership Lead here at Land App. Today, I'm going to be talking about the main features and functions that can help you either be part of a farm group or facilitate a group of farms.

So, the agenda for today is as follows: First, I'll spend five minutes giving an overview of the Land App and also touch on facilitation funds generally, such as farm groups, farm clusters, and various other names they go by. After that, I'll spend about 40 minutes discussing the main Land App functions that you can use to start facilitating a group of farms. This will include a deep dive into best practices for formatting your maps and ensuring they are named correctly. Additionally, I'll explain how to use our team tags so that, as part of our subscription, you can tag different maps to organize your team or cluster. I'll also cover how to define a farm boundary, and we'll touch upon what was covered in the previous week's webinar, including defining a farm boundary and creating a land cover map.

Next, I'll be using the Countryside Stewardship template to illustrate creating a farm plan. However, I'd like to mention that next week, we'll be discussing biodiversity offsetting. So, if you are more interested in the UK Habitats and Spaces, you may find our webinar on biodiversity offsetting, scheduled for next Tuesday, of interest.

Following that, we'll explore publishing to a map of maps, a feature we've built with facilitation funds and farm groups in mind. I'll demonstrate how it works. Lastly, we've just launched our new reports dashboard, which I'll also demonstrate. Please note that some of the services shown today are part of our subscription, indicated on the agenda with an asterisk. We'll have a question session at the end, and if you want to learn more about pricing and getting a quote, especially for the facility, let us know through the survey.

Regarding last week's session, the recording is now live on our YouTube channel, "Land App on YouTube." We had nearly 500 people attend, and it was great to see so many participants. Now, let's recap briefly what the Land App is about. I hope you at least got an idea of its capabilities from the demo. We won't be covering the basics in this session, but I want to touch on some key points mentioned last week.

Firstly, for the last five or six years, we've been putting ourselves at the centre of data aggregation. We aggregate live data from various sources, including government agencies and research bodies, to put them all in one place. This allows you to create your own plans on top of this data. We have additional functionality that allows you to collaborate with others and share where you last were. Similar to what Magic Maps does, but with a slightly different use case.

We're also extremely proud of our diverse user base, and we're continuously growing as a tool. We've now had nearly 17,000 people use our software, and we're very grateful to everyone who has contributed ideas. Your input, whether you're a research body, a land agent, a supermarket, or a farm cluster, has been instrumental in our progress. We're looking forward to seeing this partner network grow.

Before we delve into the technical demo, I'd like to spend a couple of minutes outlining one of the clusters we're working with. Thanks to the North East Farm Club, Northeast Cotswold Farm Cluster, based in the northern Cotswold, for sharing two images of their cluster as of today. They've been using the Land App for the last couple of years and have mobilized 130 farmers, some of whom are involved in the Defra scheme, going through public funding. They're also exploring private funding avenues, such as Watercourse protection, biodiversity offsetting, and carbon markets, to achieve their goals.

The images show the cluster's locations relative to the AONB and certain water bodies. Particularly, their government trials and ELMs trial, aimed at protecting the Even Load catchment. This high-level visualization demonstrates the capabilities of the Land App, which is supported by clean and authoritative data, allowing you to extract reports.

Now, let's move on to the nitty-gritty of how to use the Land App.

Throughout this demo, I really want you to keep in mind four key rules for when you're using the land app, particularly when you're trying to organize multiple stakeholders, multiple management holdings, each of which you've got their own way of working. We really want you to use the land app in a way that both facilitates their independence but also encourages their collaboration as well.

Rule number one is just to have one map per farm. What I mean by this is if your farmer members already have a land app map that they've called, say, "Mana Farm Smith," don't worry about creating a new one. If they're happy to share that map with you, you can actually use that map as the one source of truth. Often we see people try to maintain two separate maps, and two people are upkeeping a basic payment plan or a cropping plan or a stewardship plan, which just means that things get out of sync. The land app is designed for you to have one source of truth for the farm, whether it's administered by you, the facilitator, or by the farm themselves, or maybe the agent that represents the farmer. It doesn't really matter. The software is set up that you could all work from that one source of truth. So, have one map per farm.

Secondly, use folders to archive important documents. We do have an archive function which you can use, and I will show you later. However, we've also introduced folders into that left-hand panel for you to file away old claims or old stewardship agreements, for example, that you can always refer back to, and it just keeps the map looking nice and clean.

The third rule is just to name maps consistently. I'd say probably the most important rule, especially as we're now introducing this reports dashboard, is to try and be quite strict on yourself in terms of how you name the plans. Too often do I see either "new map" or "new map one" or just "Mana Farm." You know, out there, there are a lot of Mana farms and there are a lot of new maps. If you're on top of your naming convention, it will make your life a lot easier, and we've got a suggested nomenclature that you can use as optional. So, name your maps consistently.

And then finally, when defining a boundary, try and use both land registry and, for those in England, also an SBI number. Your land registry will include your entire Redline boundary, including your buildings and woodland blocks that you haven't declared to the rural payment agency, and your SBI number, if you're in England, contains a lot of really valuable data that the RPA hosts in terms of land cover that you can build your plans on. So, rule number four, try to use both land registry and an SBI number rather than just one.

We've got a little handout that we'll be sharing afterward that we call the ideal map. This is very much just an indicative guide for how an individual farm within your farm cluster should look once you've completed onboarding them, and the plans on the left-hand side are optional, but I'm just going to talk through some of the key ones now.

The infographic includes the name of the plan. So, for those that are familiar with the land app, we host different plan templates. So, they have a template for stewardship, a template for basic payment, a template for your biodiversity offsetting with UK Hab. Depending on what your workflow is, you want to use that specific plan template. So, on this infographic, we put the names of those templates that you can use, what they're used for, so what do you draw on them, and also what you don't draw on them as well. And what a good map looks like—you know, you've got an individual plan for their farm infrastructure, an individual plan for their farm environment record, etc., but they're all named consistently, i.e., the plan acronym underscore farm name underscore surname. And as I mentioned before, if it's just BPS Mana farm and then you introduce another Mana farm to your cluster, that's when we're going to start seeing a bit of confusion about which one are we referring to. So, try and keep farm name and surname consistent as well. The other thing to note is that we've got this published icon that's triggered here, and we'll be covering that during the demo, but you can now publish your data—only publish the data that you want to see on Map of Maps and the ones you want to see in the dashboard as well.

Today, I'm going to be focusing on three main plan types: ownership boundary, how do you first onboard a new farm member, defining their ownership boundary; how do you then use their SBI number to create an overarching land use plan using the basic payment template; and then I'm just going to quickly remind you how to do a countryside stewardship using that same data. The plans themselves are kind of up to you which ones you use; however, I'm just purposely avoiding the Baseline and the Land Management plan, these two UK Hab layers, because I'll be covering them next week. But ultimately, that will provide us with a location and an understanding of what they're currently doing, the Baseline, and also a future vision of what they want to do next.

Okay, so I'm now going to move across to the land app and just start working through a bit of a demo. The first thing to say, just a quick reminder, we're at the landapp.com. If you haven't got an account, you can come and sign up for free, hitting either the sign-up button or the join for free button. You should then be guided through to create a map. What I've done for the demo is I've logged in, and I've also created a demo account within our own land app account just to represent what a farm cluster might look like as you build, and so the first thing is I'm on something called our organization maps page, where I think we formally called it the maps dashboard, but we've now changed it just to the maps page, and each of these thumbnails represents an individual member of my hypothetical farm cluster. As a note, everything I show today is just going to be hypothetical. I'm not doing any actual data from anywhere, so anything you see on the map doesn't represent actually on the ground. It's just more indicative, and the first thing to say is you can see how I've named each of these plans—Farm A, Farm B's, Farm C—and then the surname. So, that could be, let's say, Mana Farm Spring Cottage or whatever it might be, with the surname as well. Those can be edited by clicking the three dots and going into the edit button, and then you can edit the name of that map. Also, within here, you can apply a team tag, and you can see I've got "cluster members." I could have many different tags, like "farming" maybe I'm running two different clusters or three different clusters, but I just want to tag that farm with a particular use case that it represents. So, I've tagged it with "cluster members," which means then I can filter my maps dashboard by cluster members. If I take that away and maybe turn on "farming," that loads up all these other maps that I don't want to see at the moment because I'm in the headspace of being a facilitator. So, I leave the cluster map as the tag just to quickly show you here before I dive into the mapping, where that's set up is you need to go to your organization page, that might be behind my head depending on where I am on your screen. By hitting the little menu icon, go into the organization, and then within organization, you set up your teams within the team section. So, here's all the different tags that we've got. You can create your own tags. It could be the name of the cluster, or it could be, you know, the water body they sit in, for example. You can then tag the maps with that particular tag.

Okay, so we're now going to begin a demo of onboarding a new farm. So, we're going to start from scratch, creating a new farm member who's just onboarded or as part of my existing farm cluster. The first thing I would do is I would go to my records, and I'm just going to get an SBI number, and then going to come on to Land App and hit new. I'm going to then create a new map, which I'm going to call "Slade's Farm" because that's where I'm actually demoing, and I'm going to use my surname, Era. Okay, so I'm creating "Slade Farm" automatically, the cluster member is assigned, but if I want to give it another tag, I can, such as "farming." Great, empty mouth.

From here, I'm then dropped as per usual on an empty map, no data currently contained other than an interactive base map that I can change using this OpenStreetMap button at the top right. So I can change, for the demo, for example, to go to Ordnance Survey Light. The next thing I can do, and the quickest, is I would always, if you've got an SBI number, hit the new button, hit "import data," and the first workflow, as we discussed last week as well, is just to import from the rural payment agency. I'll come on to it if you haven't got an SBI number because there are obviously groups that may have people without an SBI number, but a large majority of you will have a nine-digit single business identifier. From here, you can download then from the rural payment agency an up-to-date land cover map, which includes the location of their existing arable, grassland, woodland, and ponds, etc. You can then download the land parcels, which is the authoritative boundary—one feature, one polygon per field ID that represents their farm—and also the hedge data, which is an indication of where existing hedges are. However, do treat it with a pinch of salt because we've been using it for a number of years and when it's still not as accurate as we need for a lot of the stuff we're happening. However, it's as good as we can get at the moment. Once you then hit import, you're then asked to choose which of these plan templates do you want to import, and just for speed, I'm going to go straight into a basic payment scheme, and then I'm going to use that area to define an ownership boundary afterward. It's just a preferred workflow. So, I'm going to go into basic payment scheme to start with. I'm going to then change the name of this to meet the infographic that Dan sent me earlier, "BPS Farm Name," which is actually "Slade's Farm." Sorry, Slades, and hit finish.

What that does is that now sends a request to the RPA using my SBI number, and it extracts from the RPA's data those three data layers that we just touched on—land covers, land parcels, and hedgerows. You can toggle on and off layers on the left-hand side. Be aware that once you've got all three on, once you click on a map, the one that's highlighted yellow is the one that you've selected. Lower down the list is further up on the map. So just to demonstrate that, I click here, I can't reach the land covers. If I turn off land parcels, click here, I'm now selecting the land covers.

By putting it into basic payment scheme from RPA, the land app automatically assigns land use codes when it can. So just to dive into that briefly, each of these greens are permanent grassland, so, therefore, it's been given a permanent grass and code. It's got the BPS code; it's got the code name as well. Areas that don’t happen is areas like this which are declared as arable land. That's just simply the RPA does not release the cropping codes for this year. It's always a bit behind on that because obviously crop codes rotate around the farm. So, you then have to assign the codes, which we'll come on to in a moment.

The first thing you want to do as a facilitator is just get an authoritative boundary, and the reason I've done this BPS first is that then gives me quite a nice template for me to at least have a first stab at doing an authoritative ownership boundary. The way that I'm going to do this is I'm going to use land registry. So, I'm going to use land registry to create an ownership boundary. The first thing I need to do is come up to New. I then go use templates, which is the first option. I then want to find something called an ownership boundary, which I think is down at the bottom at the left, depending on what your sector is as well. And that's defined when you sign in; you might have been asked which sector you are in. Depending on which sector you're in, it would dictate where the ownership boundary is. So just have a look if you can't see it, just toggle on, toggle on another sector type. You can flip between them. So, I'm choosing ownership boundary. I now want to use the land registry, which, as it says here, is all Freehold titles for England and Wales. If anyone's in Scotland, we can maybe cover it in the Q&A if that's of interest, but there is some guidance. Basically, it's just through a slightly different workflow. I'm then hitting "pick from land registry." What that now has done is that's loaded all the land registry titles in my area of interest, and you can probably all see, I can roughly in my head see where that farm just was, but I can't quite remember everything, but I do remember it was this field parcel. So, I click on that, and by clicking on that one, because I've got this "selectable parcels within title" toggled on, it's selected both this field parcel and that one. Just to demonstrate, if I turn that off and just select one of them, it only selects the single field parcel. So, by default, most of you, I'd imagine, want to keep that title within number and then select the other parcels as well. So, they go into an orange shade. Once you're then happy with the field parcels, I'm not going to label this point. You can hit next, give it a name, which, again, remember the ownership boundary hyphen whatever you underscore. I can't remember now, Slades Kira, finish. And what that has now done is that has now got a red line boundary which, for most of my farm, and toggling them on and off, I can see that there are slight errors, i.e., slight areas that either the land registry is wrong, or I've just missed out some areas.

I just want to show you quickly how you can now improve that land registry boundary. The first thing I'm going to do is just select all of my existing ownership data. I'm just going to style it and just turn it slightly opaquer. The reason I do this is this then allows me to just have a slightly better view of what I've selected and what I haven't. So, the bits they haven't included are these little blocks of green. I can either copy them from the basic payment, so from the SBI, I can hold shift, select on those three, right-click, and copy to plan. I might just repeat that because that's quite quick. So, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get these three projects. Holding shift on my keyboard, clicking on one, keep holding shift, clicking on two, and clicking on three. I can now let go of shift. I can then right-click and I can hit copy to plan, and I can then copy those three features to my ownership plan. And by doing that now, I've got those three polygons and now part of my ownership plan.

However, as I mentioned at the start, you're better off trying to use the entire land registry. So I'm just going to push undo and come back to that workflow. Instead, I'm going to go to data layers hyphen Freehold, which is where we've got land registry Freehold data, and I'm now just going to look at the data that includes those three parcels and assume that that entire ownership boundary actually is part of my client's map. We'll come on to in a moment how you can grab like double-check this with your clients. They might provide you with a paper map, but I just wanted to show you that because these three or three fields are within the ownership of my new attendee. And what I'm going to do is I'm just actually going to select this entire land registry, which includes Cricket's Hill, right-click on that land registry, and bring that instead onto my ownership boundary. Those now those basic payment codes are now irrelevant. I've now got an ownership boundary that contains the outlines of those fields. Toggling offline registry, I now have that additional in my boundary.

Now for styling, as you can see, I've changed the default styling of this, and my new one doesn't have the new styling. Not a problem. If you click on the one that you've got the styling of that you want to keep first, hold shift and select the other one, and then go into style and just touch the opacity, you then get everything dissolved into that new polygon. So, I've now actually styled it all the same. That's just a little trick that might be of use.

Okay, so I've now got a red line boundary, or at least a red outline boundary, which I can change the styling of. Maybe I don't want it to be so dark red in the middle, but I do want a slightly thicker Red Line boundary around the outside. There's my ownership.

That's how you create an ownership boundary, which is very important for your declaration to the RPA. Obviously, you may want to know the total area, for example, and so there's two ways you can find the area of that object. The first thing is once you've got it like this, once I've right-clicked, select all, I can turn on the area. But what that's done is that's labelled all the different land registry blocks, which isn't a single hectarage. The actual way that you can get a single hectarage, there's a cheat way which I'm going to show you just because why not, which is you can just temporarily merge the features together. So, if I merge them temporarily, I get a total sum of 149, 13. Just remember if you need to, you can undo that, or if you want to not do any merging, you can actually come up to this reports tab at the top right and run your first plan report by hitting add plan and choosing ownership, done. And what that should do is that now runs a report on all the different polygons that make up my ownership boundary. So, for Slade's Farm, 149 is the size.

Okay, so that's definitely an ownership boundary. The next thing I'm just going to touch on, but again, we covered this bit in the introductory training, so I'm not going to labour the point. I'm just going to move ownership to the bottom of the list, is how do you edit, how do you edit data, i.e., improve the basic payment project that we've got? I've turned on the project. Individual features could be edited by clicking on a shape and hitting the change button at the right-hand side. So, I'm on basic payment. I've got all the basic payment codes and search for barley, and you can do that on mass by holding shift and clicking on all the different polygons that haven't got a code which, in this case, all of which are wild land. Then you can assign them all an arable code such as fallow for argument's sake. Again, I'm not going to labour the point on that, and I'm not going to touch on many of the drawing tools. They were covered in the introductory webinar, such as splitting, merging, buffering. Please do look back at the previous webinar if you want any more insight on how you can start drawing in buffer strips, etc.

So, what I've now got is I've got a basic payment, but I've got three different basic payment layers. At the moment, I've got one with land parcels, one with land covers, and one with hedge data. Probably for best practice, we only really want one. We want one basic payment project that includes the hedges and the polygons, the land use covers, and I just want to quickly show you how you can merge all of your data into a single basic payment.

First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to rename this project and remove the words "land covers" and just call this 2023, for example. So, this is my BPS 2023. Then what I want to do is I want to move these hedge lines. Hedge lines are currently on my BPS Slade's Hedge Control layer. I want to move them all onto my 2023 BPS. The easiest way to do that is you click the three dots next to the Hedge layer, hit select all, click done. I mean, you can specify just lines, but if you hit done and what that does is that is now highlighted all of the features within this plan. I can now right-click on just one of those and hit copy to plan. And that then allows me to then choose which of those which my existing plans or I'll remove all those hitches to, in this case, my BPS 2023. Hit copy features to plan. It doesn't look like much has happened, but if I toggle off hedgerows and toggle on Slades, you can see that now I've got those hedges have been highlighted. I can change the color of them, for example, just to illustrate, and there's my yellow hedges that I've just added to my BPS plan.

Other things just to make you aware of, and I might just rename this one as well, but the land parcels maybe don’t need to be a BPS project, but the land parcel data contains all of the field IDs that are assigned by the veropone agency, as does the land covers as well. So, you may want to just file that one away at the top and mainly just work from a BPS. For me, I don't need this hedge layer anymore, so to save confusion, I'm actually going to archive it. I'm going to move it away.

So, I've got an ownership boundary and a basic payment. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on creating a Land Management Plan. I'm going to be using the countryside stewardship template through this demo, but obviously, next Tuesday, I'll be using UK habitat as the language, but the principle is the same. I just want to use my existing RPA data to start creating, for my client, where they want to be doing stewardship, whether that's part of a landscape restoration as per the Northeast Cotswold cluster as I just shown or maybe just for the individual.

So, there's two ways you can go about it. For today's demo, I'm going to duplicate the entire basic payment project and just create an arbitrary stewardship with all that data. On Tuesday next week, I'm going to show a slightly different workflow that's more relevant for the biodiversity offsetting, but the principles are the same. So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a Countryside Stewardship Plan by hitting the three dots next to BPS. Actually, no, pause there. I'm going to hit new. We've introduced the new workflow. Hit new, choose use template. This time, I want to find the countryside stewardship template. I'm choosing Countryside Stewardship, and what I want to do is I want to create it from an existing plan. So rather than starting from scratch and importing new data, I want to use the existing stewardship, existing BPS plan because it has, for example, my hedgerow lines on there as well.

I then select the existing plans I want to create a stewardship from my existing BPS. Hit next, and this time, again, checking Dan's infographic, I'm going to look at naming it correctly, Slade's CSS. Hit finish, and what that's now done is that is now created an exact replica of my basic payment but in the language of Countryside Stewardship. There are no codes assigned. I can now very quickly start to build up a bit of a plan of where I want to target certain interventions. Some things might be whole field level, and I'm not going to be diving into what the stewardship codes mean, but that's just hypothetically say these two want to go into GS2. I can click on one or two shapes and assign it GS2. In this field, I may want to make this field a bit more rectangle by putting in an option in this corner. I can then right-click, choose split, and maybe make that rectangle from where would I want to go from here across to let's go to here, double-click, and now what I've done is I've split my field into two. I can assign this little, you know, oddly shaped bit, maybe a small field corner. So that's a whole field option and a part field option.

I just wanted to draw those on. Other options you may want to be drawing are in-field options. So, let's just hypothetically choose one of these fields for a lapwing plot. And by the way, we do cover how you do all of these functions during the introductory webinar, so I don't want to get caught up on the actual how-to. I just want to mainly show you the type of thing you might be drawing. What I want to draw is a lapwing plot, so I'm going to basically choose a field. These might be slightly too small for a lapwing plot, but more to demonstrate the point. I can then add a rectangle. I can choose the width and the height, so let's go. I think there is a minimum requirement for a lapwing plot, but I can't remember off the top of my head what it is, and I can then assign lapwing to that particular feature.

As a note, every time you're drawing a countryside stewardship option, a couple of things happen. The payment rate is automatically calculated, so how much I'd get paid per year for that particular feature. In this case, 36 pounds, 69 pence, and we'll also have a direct hyperlink to the dot gov guidance as well. So if you do need to clarify what I've just said, which is what's the minimum area for a lapwing plot, you can have a look in here and try to find that as you're mapping.

Okay, so that's a bit of a stewardship plan. And then final thing is just there might be capital items, so drawing trees in fields. I can click on a field, hit draw, choose. You know the different points on drawing. These could be infield trees, for example, tree planting, and that's hetero, oops, I hope you get the point. Protection for now, or you may want to be drawing a hetero feature, like planting a new hetero. Click on the shape, click once, and then land that automatically magnetizes to the edge of that field, like so. Okay, I'd assign that to the N11, which I think is planting new hedges.

Okay, so hopefully, that's just illustrating how you can use the Land App to help build up that picture. Again, we will be doing a training webinar for Countryside Stewardship fairly soon, so keep your eye out for that.

If you're more interested in what I was just drawing and why, we can touch on that during that webinar, but in principle, now for my new member in 20 minutes, what I've managed to do is I've managed to download their data. I've got an area of their ownership. I've then uploaded to their map their field boundaries, so I've got their field parcels if I need them or a basic payment plan, a land use map, and I've also very roughly and crudely drawn a very basic Countryside Stewardship plan that took a matter of moments and definitely needs more thought, but that's the principle. You can quite quickly onboard, locate, and start drafting up plans for individual clients.

The first thing that you're welcome to do is you may want to invite the farmer or the land manager into the map to say hi and to confirm the ownership boundary, whether it's right or wrong. To do that, you go up to the sharing settings at the top right, and in here, you can add collaborators to your map. So, it could be farmname@gmail.com, whatever it might be. We've got different levels of permission. It's really worth saying that for the facilitator model that we're promoting, farmers do not need to pay Land App a subscription. We have a subscription that farmers are welcome to join, and there are reasons they may want to join, but as a rule of thumb, we're only looking for the professionals that are facilitating the cluster to join the subscription. So just as a note, there are three levels of permission. You can invite them as read-only, so this might be that they've never used Land App before, you don't quite trust them to change things, but you do want them to come around and have a look. Read-only means they can come in and view the data, and so they'll be able to come in, zoom in and out, they'll be able to look at the corner and then maybe on the phone and say to you, "Yeah, I'm looking at Lower House at the moment, and you've got that wrong." So, you can kind of have that dynamic relationship with them. Or you can invite them as an editor, and they can actually come in and manipulate the shapes, i.e., drag and drop, cut, and delete features as well. I'd say early on, err on the side of caution, read-only is definitely the place to start. However, use your farmers as a resource. You'll be amazed how many farmers are already using software like this, if not Land App already. They're a really good resource and might be able to just be able to do a lot of the work for you. You don't need an editor. The third permission, I just want to spend two moments on that, is called publisher. This is particularly powerful if you're onboarding a farmer that you're onboarding has already got a Land App map. One of the early questions that you can ask is perhaps they already got some GIS software, is it Land App? If the answer is yes, great. Get them to add you as a publisher by giving you publisher permission. One means you don't have to go through all the stages I've just shown you. They've probably already done it for you, and secondly, you can actually just go into their map and publish it to your map of maps, which I'll cover at the moment and during the Q&A if people want to learn a bit more about what publisher means, do pop it in the chat, and we can definitely go around onto that. But yeah, read-only an editor for any farm members you're inviting in, or publisher permission for anyone who's already got a map that you want to be part of.

Publishing data is the next thing I want to touch on, which is how you can start creating a landscape view of all your different farms. As I mentioned, I've done a bit of work yesterday just to try and prep this fake account, and so what I've done is I've published those five cluster members. Just to recap, those five cluster members that I've shown in this home map, but I really want to see what they all look like next to one another. So back in Slade's Farm, the map I've just been creating, I'm going to first publish to my map of maps all of the plans that I want to see on Map with Maps. The way I do that is I hover over the plan name. Firstly, I want to publish ownership, which is here, and click the black tick, and it then goes green. It then says, "Publish to your organization's data layers." I also want to do the same for my basic payment project, and I want to do the same for my Countryside Stewardship project. Now, what that means, it doesn't seem like much has happened, but at midnight every night, the Land App goes on your behalf and stitches together every plan that has got that tick turned green, and every at midnight, it then creates a separate unique data layer for you that sits under this organization header. So within organization, I now have access to a number of different layers called map of maps, plan name, and I can toggle those on. So, I'll start with ownership boundary and zoom out, and hopefully, you'll be able to see some of the other farms that I'm working with in the area. As I mentioned, arbitrary boundaries, but at least just gives you an idea of their location. So, you can see relative to one another where your farm clusters are with ownership boundaries.

Okay, that's one. You can also then turn on Baseline Habitat Assessment, for example, which is the habitat layer, so you can see where their existing habitats are. All their Countryside Stewardship options, again a bit thin on the ground. Some of you have got way better stewardship maps than I have, but it allows you to start visualizing where one another's options are, and we're really, you know, there's no time like the present to try and get farms and their habitats to be connecting through the landscapes. Another benefit of turning these layers on, and so let me just turn on say the basic payment ownership boundary so we can start to see these. You can also start to, well, firstly, you can print a map, which I'll come on to a moment, but you can, secondly, start turning on other data layers to see how your farm cluster interacts with some of those data sets I mentioned in that slide deck. So, for example, if I wanted to say which of my cluster members are in an AOMB, I can toggle on the AOMB and see instantly which of my cluster members are inside or outside. Same with triple SIs, the same with what's the other good one, networks and habitat networks is really start to layer up these options and start to understand the context of the cluster that you're managing, the farm group that you're managing, how you can tell which farm is which. If you click on it, on the right-hand side, it will tell you the name of that farm. So, the name of the farm will automatically be there alongside a hyperlink to their map. Worth reiterating that on Map of Maps, I can't edit this map, I can't delete it, I can't change the shape. It's because this is only a view of the map that's in the other area. To get to it, I need to click on, in this case, Farm D Surname, that then opens up their particular map, of which I can turn on the layer and zoom to go and see what their file looks like. And again, you can see how crudely I did this plan yesterday. It was very much just a demonstration, but I've got my BPS, my stewardship, my Baseline Habitat Assessment.

Okay, so for the final five minutes, before we come to Q&A (and by the way, I can see some questions coming in, please feel free to use the Q&A function to ask anything else you may have), the final thing I want to say is the other benefit of using Land App's publish function is we've got a new report dashboard that's gone live as of last week or the week before. This dashboard is a way of quantifying what your map of maps is showing.

So, I've got a map of maps switched on at the moment. I can see I've got lots of farms in there, but the RPA has asked me, "What's the total hectarage of your farm cluster? How much BPS do you have? What's the total area of your stewardship?" I want to show you the functionality that we've released. The first thing is that you now find it within the reports button within your map. So, you come in here and hit reports, that will then load a separate tab which, in Blue Peter fashion, I've loaded up here just because when you first load it, it takes 10 seconds.

The home page of this report dashboard represents everything that's published on my map of maps. I've got a couple of maps up in Norfolk. If I zoom in, there are going to be a couple of areas that I want to exclude because I'm actually only really wanting to work with my cluster. So, the first thing that you can do is I can actually filter my dashboard by catchment. In this case, my arbitrary cluster or group is all within the Wye and tributaries, so that is now filtered out some of the work we're doing in Cheshire, Gloucestershire, and up in Norfolk, and it's now showing me the four plans for which I was just showing you on map of maps.

The first thing on this homepage it shows you the total area, so I can extract, for example, that my four cluster members have 501.55 hectares, and it's broken down into this ratio of crop to grass to other. Also, within my cluster, these are all the different high-level stats, so I've got 501 hectares of basic payment drawn, 91 hectares of Countryside Stewardship, and 453 hectares of UK Habitat Baseline. We will be diving into some more of the functions like 30 by 30 during the BNG webinar next week, but the main thing I wanted to show you is I should make a little teaser, so just to show you once you've done the mapping and using the dashboard, that can start to quantify your group's biodiversity unit impact. My four farms are actually causing a net loss of 7.5 units, which hopefully isn't the case across everyone's groups, but is just a way of automatically calculating units. We'll come on to that next week.

The main page I wanted to show you was the basic payment and the Countryside Stewardship because these provide an overarching map for your cluster and a breakdown of those different plan types by farm as well. Just to show you, here's the overarching map with all the different land use types that I can download and export if I want, or I might be more interested in just looking at a particular farm, let's say Farm A. I just want to see Farm A's breakdown. I could then have a look at, say, the basic payment for them, which in this case is 122 hectares of permanent crops.

We're very much at the early stages of developing this dashboard, so feedback's obviously welcome as well. But the final tab that I want to show you is Countryside Stewardship, and this breaks down all of the stewardship plans that you've currently got on the Land App as published and gives you a breakdown of the payment rates, either at the cluster level, which this is currently showing, or, as I was just looking at, you can break it down by individual farm member as well. Because I haven't got much data (excuse me, I haven't got much data like Capital items, I forgot to draw those on), they should show in here, and there is probably a null element somewhere actually to have a look at, but that should summarize your first year and five-year payment rates as well.

We think this dashboard is the perfect tool for you to start seeing your cluster as a group, to start administering your cluster as a single entity, but also be able to apply with that deeper insight that you're going to need to fill out forms from the RPA or apply, hopefully, for Natural Capital funding as well

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