Clien Farms | The Allerton Project

Climate change is one the biggest challenges we face as a society: it is also one of the greatest risks to the agri-food sector, and farming in particular. While agriculture can act as a source of greenhouse gas emissions, it can and must also play a vital role in acting as one of the solutions to climate change.

The EU Horizon 2020 ClienFarms project ClieNFarms – Climate Neutral Farms aims to support the transition to climate-neutral and climate-resilient European farming by scaling up systemic, locally relevant solutions at a farm level.

This will be achieved interactively through integrating and improving existing solutions to achieve economically viable business models of farming systems through the involvement of farmers, extension services, agri-food business, policymakers, financal services and citizens.

The core concept of the project is a demonstration approach called the Innovative Systemic Solution Space (I3S). Each I3S across the European consortium is focussed on a different element of the agricultural supply chain; the Allerton Project is working alongside Nestlé to help decarbonise its cereal supply chain in the East of England by working with farmers to help adopt more sustainable production methods.

The Allerton Project will act as the main demonstration farm in the I3S, with a small number of lead commercial farms and larger number of outreach farms beneath, clustered into distinct ‘archetypes’ to best group similar farm types together by factors such as rotation, soil type or tillage regime. We aim to facilitate on-farm baselining of natural capital resources and soil data, and dissemination of best practice to enable effective knowledge-exchange between participating farmers in the I3S farm network.

Ultimately, ClieNFarms will lead to the creation of a carbon credit trading platform for ‘insetting’ of quantifiable decarbonisation within the cereal supply chain, avoiding the need for external ‘offsets’.

The project is supported by the existing Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENs) initiative Landscape Enterprise Networks – A 3Keel initiative to support resilient landscapes., pioneered by GWCT Allerton Project, Nestlé and 3Keel in 2017. LENs is a system for organising the buying and selling of nature based solutions, and has been active in the East of England since 2020, purchasing natural capital outcomes from farmers in areas such as clean water, healthy soil and increased biodiversity.