What is the SIP?

The Sustainable Intensification Research Platform (SIP) is a multi-organisation research programme, funded by Defra to collectively explore the opportunities and risks for SI, from a range of perspectives and at a range of scales, across England and Wales. Collaboration is vital to SI. At the heart of the SIP is a community spanning farmers, industry experts, academia, environmental organisations, policymakers and other stakeholders.

The platform currently comprises three linked multi-partner, transdisciplinary research projects:

• SIP 1
  'Integrated Farm Management for improved economic, environmental and social performance'
• SIP 2
  'Opportunities and risks for farming and the environment at landscape scales'

The above two projects, which started in 2014, will run for three years and will investigate ways to increase farm productivity while reducing environmental impacts and benefits that agricultural land provides to society.

• SIP 3
  A six-month scoping study on 'The influence of external drivers and actors on the sustainability and productivity of English and Welsh farming', which has been completed.

Study Areas

In addition to the SIP community, a network of five study farms and seven study landscape areas are central to the SIP. The farms have been chosen from a range of farming sectors, systems and situations across England and Wales.

Study Farms:

• North Wyke (Devon) and Duchy Future Farm (Cornwall)
• Henfaes (North Wales)
• The Allerton Project (Leicestershire)
• Nafferton Farm (Northumberland)
• Morley Farm (Norfolk)

Landscape areas:

• Taw (Devon)
• Conwy (Wales)
• Upper Welland (East Midlands)
• Nafferton area (Northumberland)
• Wensum and Yare (Norfolk)
• Avon (Hampshire)
• Eden (Cumbria)

SIP Partners

SIP has a number of partners and sub-contractors. Read more »

SIP Objectives

The SIP will develop more integrated and collaborative ways of funding, conducting and applying agricultural research around sustainable intensification.

The platform will:

• Develop a community of practice - stronger links between scientists, farmers, economists, stakeholders and policymakers from a wide variety of organisations
• Utilise research farms to host present and future research on farming systems and land management
• Create a data platform to enable access to the wealth of data collected within the SIP projects for researchers, policymakers and other interested parties

Read more about the objectives of the 3 SIP Projects »

Key principles within SIP

SIP will adopt a holistic approach that examines SI from a range of perspectives, and geographical scales and timeframes, at farm, landscape and supply chain and market levels.

SIP will provide and demonstrate tools to help individuals and groups identify and take advantage of SI opportunities that exist and that are appropriate to them.

SIP will provide tools, information to enable stakeholders to identify the destinations and routes that deliver an SI legacy that balances different objectives and priorities.

Policy background

Food, farming and environmental policy are intrinsically interconnected. Whilst not a policy goal per se, it is considered that sustainable intensification of agriculture can help to deliver benefits and achieve, simultaneously, Defra priorities such as growing the rural economy, leading the world in food and farming and improving the environment.

Defra has established the Sustainable Intensification Research Platform (SIP) to explore the opportunities and risks for SI, at farm, landscape and market/supply chain scale. Key policy drivers that have led to the creation of the SIP include:

• Meeting the challenge of feeding a growing population sustainably, with greater competition for resources in an era of climate change
• Better integration of polices relating to land management, delivering more coherent messages and improving the targeting of advice and incentive schemes to farmers,
• Developing and stimulating the uptake of new technologies to improve farm competitiveness

Whilst a large amount of information about the economic, environmental and social performance of farming exists, these tend to be very specific areas of research. The integration of knowledge to inform land management decisions tends to be down to farmers or advisers themselves. The SIP will explore ways of translating and integrating current knowledge on into systems-based approaches to help land managers, the agri-food industry and policy-makers to balance economic, environmental and social outcomes from farming