About the Central Dartmoor Farm Cluster

It originally evolved as an output of the Dartmoor Facilitation Fund from those farmers who were most engaged in the ‘All the Moor’s Butterfly’ project that ran between 2016 and 2019. This project provided us with advice and training on how we could better manage our areas of boggy rhos pastures to benefit the rare Marsh Fritillary butterfly.

This was followed by encouragement and support from the Dartmoor Hill Farm project to come together as a group, along with really helpful advice from them and others on how we could further enhance our other wildlife habitats. Additionally, they provided guidance on how, by working together over a landscape scale, we can achieve larger changes than if we were working alone – after all wildlife needs to be able to move between farms and so we’re working to provide interconnected habitats.

To this end we have undertaken many projects  on our individual farms, but in order to help realise our ambition of delivering larger collaborative projects in 2023 we established a Community Interest Company.

Delivering public goods

Our shared goal is to manage our farms better for nature and the wider environment whilst remaining financially sustainable. By working together, we can provide greater benefits on a landscape scale to wildlife and the public who walk and ride through our farms, whilst also producing high quality food.

During 2023, the Farm Cluster developed a Landscape Recovery proposal for an ambitious project aimed at creating an innovative framework for the future management for the farms and commons across a large part of Dartmoor. Having secured funding to develop these plans further we now have a dynamic team working with the Dartmoor community in building this exciting opportunity.