Archie's 2025 Nuffield Scholarship

I’m exploring the following questions:

• What is multifunctional land use in practice, and how does it work?
• What wider benefits does multifunctionality generate?
• How can you measure, value and support multifunctional productivity?
• What implications would redefining productivity have for UK agriculture?

Multifunctional landscapes (MFL) are land in which all forms of ecosystem service (ES) (benefits to people) are balanced, regardless of whether they are paid for or not. ES include energy, food, water, risk reduction, heritage, culture, nature, medicines and climate mitigation. However, to be successful this demands a wider view of what ‘productivity’ means, re-defined as “[land that is]…highly productive when production is interpreted to include all potential market and non-market outputs”.

Benchmarking performance in this way could help reconcile challenging choices posed by finite land availability by enabling recognition (and in some cases reward) for a greater range of outcomes from land. Could this approach offer a route to greater sustainability for the rural land use sector beyond traditional enterprise diversification? However, measuring wider outcomes and going beyond traditional market-base reward mechanisms presents significant challenges to policy and practice.

This study will explore global best practice related to MFL; on-farm and landscape-scale approaches, measurement of environmental and social outcomes, financier and funder demands, supply chain and policy influences. Global experiences drawn from complex agricultural, environmentally and socially focussed landscapes managed by a diverse range of people will enable me to build an overview that can then be used to support MFL at scale in the UK and beyond.

People are the key to my study. I want to meet people who are doing amazing things to reduce our environmental and social impact, linking farming systems to environmental recovery, measuring things that are hard to measure, restoring lands and supporting communities or business to address social and environmental challenges.

Would you, or anyone you know, be willing to…

• Help me understand a landscape or community?
• Show me how you identify and track a range of outcomes from land?
• Talk to me about how you are linking money to people?
• Help me understand policies and regulations that help/hinder your work?
  

• New Zealand
• USA
• Costa Rica
• Kenya
• Zambia
• Nepal
• Bhutan
• India
• France
• Spain Italy
• United Kingdom

Can you help suggest contacts or places I should visit, or people in these countries I could speak to?

I am lucky enough to manage Spains Hall Estate. After a 20 year career in the water sector, non-governmental organisations and the last 12 years in the rural sector I’ve developed a completely different way of managing our land. 

We’ve moved away from conventional commodity crops in favour of a mix of sustainable hazel and walnuts in an agroforestry layout, nature-based approaches to reduce local flood risk (including beavers), and large-scale habitat creation and management (we have ancient forests, rivers, wetlands, biodiversity crops and grasslands).

My aim is to balance what we can extract and sell in a market (such as nuts and meat) and things the system produces which aren’t yet saleable (clean water, less flooding, pollination, clean air, community benefits). It’s also about mitigating the risk of climate change to our business. 

Nuffield aim to inspire passion in people and develop their potential to lead positive change in farming and food. They award life-changing scholarships that unlock individual potential and broaden horizons through study and travel overseas, with a view to developing the farming and agricultural industries.

www.nuffieldscholar.org

I’m incredibly grateful to the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association for their generous sponsorship. The Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association (RNAA) is a charitable organisation established in 1847 with a mission to advance education, bring together the local community, enhance appreciation, and foster prosperity in agriculture and the countryside.

www.rnaa.org.uk