FRAMEwork Farmers Pilot New Tools

Zeesterweg Cluster farmers in the Netherlands help test a new toolkit to monitor biodiversity in arable farmland. 

Zeesterweg Cluster Farmers, Facilitators and Scientists in the field | © Taskscape Media

At FRAMEwork, we’re always looking to support new innovations in biodiversity agritech and to share their benefits with our network. It's also important to our project to work with existing NGOs and initatives across Europe with shared goals.

In this spirit, Zeesterweg Cluster farmers in the Netherlands recently joined forces with agricultural businesses across their region to help Earthwatch test a new toolkit to monitor biodiversity in arable farmland. 

The Agricultural Biodiversity Watch (AB Watch) is being developed within the 'Farming with Nature' project powered by Earthwatch, who say that the tool aims to: 

“help farmers easily understand and record a baseline of biodiversity for their farms and to monitor how changes to their farming practices affects biodiversity.”

Earthwatch is a European NGO dedicated to connecting people with nature and providing tools to affect positive change when it comes to protecting the environment. Their ‘Farming with Nature’ project supports farmers and agri-businesses to reimagine the way they farm and produce food. 

Representatives of Earthwatch visited our Netherlands cluster earlier in the year to talk about their toolkits and invited the farmers to participate in the test phase of this new piece of tech. Boeren Natuur Flevoland cooperative, an associate organisation of FRAMEwork in the region, also got involved and a range of agricultural businesses and companies signed up to undertake the trials. 

Cluster facilitator Martine Schoone told us that engaging with the pilot allowed for:

“participating farmers to become acquainted with self-monitoring and at the same time help to develop a good testing tool. This increases the chance that a toolkit will eventually be developed that can be widely used and that will be of use to farmers.” 

You can find more info in Dutch here, and in English here.

We look forward to seeing Earthwatch take the AB Watch forward, and for it to hopefully become a beneficial tool for farmers in our network.