The Horizon-funded project 'Contracts2.0' brought together farmers, policy-makers and researchers to learn how agri-environmental schemes can be made better to support farmer livelihoods and the environment
A four-day workshop organised by Contracts2.0 team Jennifer Dodsworth, Katrin Prager (University of Aberdeen) and Annabelle LePage (Natural England) brought together farmers, advisors, delivery agencies, policy makers and researchers from the UK, Belgium and Ireland. The group learned together about how agri-environmental schemes can be made more effective, delivering better outcomes for the environment and supporting farmers livelihoods. The Irish have successfully run various pilots of paying farmers by results (instead of prescribed management activities), so they were an excellent source of information about how scorecards can have a simple design but still capture progress on key indicators, how payment levels should be set, and what changes are needed to make this innovative approach work in our current administrative systems.
The workshop participants in the Delphi Valley, Co Mayo, Ireland, 18 May 2022
