Our Water Net Gain project manager has written a guest blog for the Ofwat Water Innovation Fund sharing six lessons from our national farmer engagement programme and they’re relevant to anyone working at the intersection of conservation, water management, and agriculture.
Through in-person interviews and wider outreach across four focus catchments, we found that personal, relationship-based approaches consistently outperformed digital and formal channels. Farmers were most willing to engage when they felt genuinely understood, not managed. Trusted local intermediaries, like our local rivers trust farm advisors, made a significant difference.
We also found real challenges: tenant farmers were harder to reach, recent policy changes have eroded trust in government schemes, and competition between programmes risks leaving farmers with engagement fatigue.
The headline? Farmers aren’t a uniform population and any scheme that treats them as one is likely to struggle. Successful catchment-scale Nature-based Solutions require genuine co-design, local knowledge, and long-term relationship building.
Read the full blog via this link https://waterinnovation.challenges.org/news-updates/come-rain-or-shine-nature-based-solutions-need-farmers-but-are-farmers-ready-to-partner/Â
