EFG Chairman wins Farmers Weekly Game Changer Award

The Environmental Farmers Group (EFG) chairman Rob Shepherd won the Farmers Weekly Game Changer of the Year 2024 award recently, at the annual Farmers Weekly farming awards, which took place at the prestigious Grosvenor House Hotel.

The Game Changer award is a new category for 2024 and attracted a highly competitive field of ten extremely worthwhile nominees.

Rob is the Chairman of the Environmental Farmers Group (EFG) – a farmer-owned business which brings farmers together in cluster groups to secure the best financial returns and environmental results, by providing eco-system services on a landscape scale.

The EFG’s mission is to harness scale and member cooperation to secure the best environmental results and financial returns for a wide range of natural capital goods and services. EFG is focussed on:

• Biodiversity and species recovery
• Clean water
• Net carbon zero farming by 2040

Alongside these key environmental outcomes, EFG’s objectives are to:

• Provide a fair financial return for farmers delivering environmental goods and services
• Have baseline environmental data produced and owned by farmers
• Be a highly credible brand and trusted trading partner with an excellent public image

In 2013, working closely with Teresa Dent of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, Rob became the lead farmer of the UK’s first cluster group of farmers.

“We all agreed that we wanted to determine our own destiny,” Rob said.

“Our experience was that diktats from on high don’t really work the same across different landscapes. We wanted a less prescriptive approach to conservation – something more farmer-led.”

The group opted to decide its own priorities and choose which species to encourage.

More like-minded farmers formed their own clusters in the area, joining forces to form the Martin Down Super Cluster, encompassing 7,500ha.

Rob and Teresa then worked together to see if they could build a commercial solution, to maximise the good work farmer clusters are doing.

This led to the creation of the EFG, which works alongside the cluster model, scaling up the collaborative work done on farms. To date, over 560 farmers have joined the EFG, working in regional groups to reverse biodiversity loss, deliver clean water and sequester carbon across more than 267,000ha – the equivalent of approximately 3% of England’s farmland.

Cranborne Estate plays an integral role in the work of the EFG.

Gavin Fauvel, Estate Director for Cranborne and adviser to the EFG says:

“At Cranborne, we take our responsibility to protect nature seriously. We strive to balance the need to grow food and feed with the importance of improving the environment. We recognise that, as farmers, we have a unique part to play in protecting our soils; spare land for important species recovery, especially pollinators and ground-nesting birds; and reducing pollution.

“By co-operating at scale with our neighbours in the Martin Down Farmer Cluster, we’ve seen real benefits across a wider landscape. Now, with the country’s eyes on reducing carbon emissions, we can help others meet national targets: benefitting wildlife on our farms and providing an opportunity to trade. By working as part of a larger collection of clusters, the Environmental Farmers Group can bring even greater scale and impact to delivering these “services” – we believe it is that ability (and ease) to trade at scale, provided by the EFG, that will be attractive to those seeking to achieve biodiversity net gain. All the while, our key driver is nature-friendly food production.”

Sources: Farmers Weekly, The Environmental Farmers Group