Participatory research in the Welland river basin

We have been carrying out research into soil management and catchment management at Loddington for many years.  Throughout, our aspiration is to identify or develop methods that will meet multiple objectives simultaneously.  That means benefits to the farmer adopting the management practice, and benefits to wider society such as improved water quality, reduced flood risk or enhanced biodiversity. 

That is not something we can achieve on our own but involves a series of interactions with a wide range of people with different interests.  The way we do this varies. It may simply be capturing feedback on existing research, or enabling others to set our research agenda, or actively involving farmers and others in the research, often on their own land.  The approaches range from 'consultation' to 'co-production'. 

Such a participatory research approach has long been adopted in primarily agricultural countries across Asia, Africa and South America, and I have adopted this approach myself when working with West African farmers managing a groundnut/millet rotation on severely degraded soils.  But participatory research has been adopted in the rest of the World only much more recently. 

Together with colleagues at Nottingham University, I recently published a journal paper which evaluated five research projects that we had carried out in the past five years across the spectrum of engagement. The paper is available here for a limited period. 

In these projects, we work with members of two local farmer groups, farmers in our landscape scale Water Friendly Farming project, and members of the Welland Resource Protection Group.  While the farmers groups provide our link to a range of active farm businesses, the Welland Resource Protection Group comprises a much wider range of people spanning farming and wider societal interests.  The range of expertise represented in this group ensures that multiple objectives are addressed in guiding future research, but the research also feeds into farmer workshops coordinated by members of the group, providing a link back into the farming community so that new participants with new ideas can constantly be recruited.

Welland Resource Protection Group members discuss a soil management experiment at Loddington