Cluster & Landscape Connect

Cluster & Landscape Connect (CLC) is an umbrella organisation providing support for the farm clusters and Landscape Recovery projects working across Norfolk and Suffolk. Through bringing together group facilitators and lead farmers we hope to give greater strength and voice to all our individual clusters and groups.

Here’s how….

Creating a solid foundation

To ensure facilitators of each individual farm cluster feel confident that they have laid the basic legal and financial foundations of the group. Additionally, they feel confident and supported in creating an identity and, if desired, a logo and website. Via the CLC, they are confident that they have access to professionals in all these fields.

Demonstrating what good looks like

Setting standards across the entire Norfolk and Suffolk farmed area. On one level, this is good practice in running the groups (data protection, confidentiality etc). On the deeper level, this will be looking at ways of baselining certain environmental standards or accessing help from other agencies.

Collaborating for greater understanding

Bringing together clusters for test and trial at large landscape scale and joining the dots to create an ecological landscape.

Support for all

Giving individual clusters support to create one-off projects that can then be shared with the other clusters – as an example, farmers in the NNCG may trial using bio stimulants on wheat to increase drought resilience, while farmers in Broads may investigate markets for reeds grown in paludiculture system.

Outcomes:

We envisage three main outcomes from this work:

Benefit to the farmed landscape environment through connected ecological awareness, betterment and consideration across a large, contiguous area.

Benefit to the farmers and facilitators within the groups because of the feeling of being connected and supported. The impact of this more supportive approach on the mental well-being of the farmers cannot be overstated.

Benefit to the communities – an enhanced ecological and environmental landscape will tap into the ‘nature’s remedy’ aspect of health and well-being but, we also feel that by coming together in a far more cohesive way, we can start to build a narrative that will play a positive role in re-connecting communities with the land and with farmers.