Dartmoor ELM Scorecard Version 1

The first iteration of the Dartmoor scorecard is now ready for testing. Whilst we're working specifically with four commons, and their associated home farms, we wanted to give as many Dartmoor farmers as possible the opportunity to have a look and feedback.

Quick refresh on a few things before the link.

Firstly, the objective of the scorecard is to evidence how farmers are delivering Defra's 6 public goods, which is how farmers will be paid under ELM. They are:

• Clean Air

• Clean & Plentiful Water

• Beauty, Heritage & Engagement

• Protection from & Mitigation of Environmental Hazards

• Mitigation of and Adaptation to Climate Change

• Thriving Plants & Wildlife

This approach is very different to how the Basic Payment Scheme worked.

Secondly, our design brief from the farmer Advisory Team included a few things:

• Try and keep it simple

• Try and create something farmers could do by themselves, without need of extra help unless they want it

• Put enough evidence on the scorecard that once its been submitted, to the RPA or whomever, and approved, the evidence should mean that the public goods you've delivered in that year can't be queried in future years e.g. can the scorecard reduce the risk of payments being reclaimed in future

The tension between trying to keep the scorecard clear and simple whilst trying to provide strong enough evidence of the public goods being delivered has been the biggest design challenge in creating the scorecard and its where your feedback will be most helpful.

Finally - expectation management.

We would have loved to produce the all singing all dancing perfect version, which was hosted on a website, a very user friendly website, where the accompanying mapping system, through which you could submit your evidence, was up and running and all the questions are perfect. This is not that version. This is version 1, where you might have to imagine a bit what it could be and mostly where you tell us if you think this is the right path to go down and list all the flaws we need to fix to get to that all singing all dancing perfect version.

Some technical notes for those of you wanting to test the scorecard:

• Look at the questionnaire about the scorecard first. This should give you a sense of what we hope to get out of the testing process.

• We tried very hard to format all the spreadsheets so they were only one page wide but we're not convinced they always open like this for everybody. If, when you open a spreadsheet, there's a button at the top which says 'Enable Editing' click that and hopefully the formatting should come good. If you chose to print it then be aware it's a lot of paper.

• Sometimes the text is pretty small because we tried to make it all fit on one page.

• You don't need to survey your whole farm to test the scorecard. Some questions automatically apply to the whole farm, some might be at a field parcel scale. It's enough to test those questions on one field parcel, that should tell you if the question works and how much effort is involved in answering it.

• We're still working on some species ID cards to help people with the habitat elements but, if you wanted to do some extra testing, you could try using an app for plant identification and then tell us if you think there's a role for apps in the delivery of ELM.

Apps we'd suggest are:

Sward App - Apps on Google Play

PictureThis: Identify Plant, Flower, Weed and More - Apps on Google Play

• We'll have more questions about the kind of mapping you'd like in future but we think something like the LandApp would work well accompanying the scorecard. So if you want to have a look and tell us what you think that would be great.

Download the questionnaire on how you found the scorecard (also available at the bottom of this page online):

Scorecard Accompanying Questions

.xlsx

Download XLSX • 25KB

Download the Dartmoor Scorecard Version 1:

Dartmoor Scorecard Version 1

.xlsx

Download XLSX • 5.78MB

Download the transect sheets for answering the scorecard habitat questions:

ELM Habitat Scorecard Transects

.xlsx

Download XLSX • 49KB

If you fill in the scorecard and the questionnaire on the scorecard in Excel then please email them, when you have finished, to hbell@dartmoor.gov.uk

Answer questions on the scorecard online if you prefer: