// by Colin
At Ourside, we believe that every business and every sector has digital potential and as a company, we are committed to working with clients that are willing to take on big challenges and make the world a better place.
With that in mind, we are delighted to collaborate with The Bride Project to develop a new platform that will incentivize farmers to increase biodiversity-managed areas on their lands. The Farming with Nature initiative will score farms based on the Area and Quality of a wide variety of habitats with additional incentives for certain plant and animal species.
The project aims to strengthen the connection between farmers and the community through transparent stewardship of the land and a more sustainable approach to food production from the ground up.
This project will include branding and designing, developing, and testing a biodiversity management system with habitat and species scoring and mapping. The platform will include a back office for administrators to set up farms and map their fields, boundaries, and habitats. It will also include a mobile app that allows ecologists to monitor and grade managed biodiversity area quality and quantity. The goal is to help farmers achieve a minimum of 10% biodiversity area of their holding.
For farmers, the app will be a very useful tool to help them to gauge their performance and also to see the financial implications of different scenarios on their farms. The project is being led by Donal Sheehan and Sinead Hickey of The Bride Project alongside Sinead Treanor, a highly experienced consultant in the Agricultural sector with a focus on biodiversity and sustainability.
We are extremely proud that our team has been chosen to deliver this project, which will have real and lasting positive outcomes for our environment.
About the Bride Project
The BRIDE Project (Biodiversity Regeneration In a Dairying Environment) is an innovative agri-environment project based in the River Bride catchment of north-east County Cork and West Waterford, Ireland. The project is co-funded by the European Union and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine through the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) funding initiative and the project will operate through the period 2018-2023.
The Project aims to design and implement a results-based approach to conserve, enhance and restore habitats in lowland intensive farmland. An innovative feature of the BRIDE Project is the landscape-scale approach to biodiversity whereby groups of farmers in a given area will be encouraged to implement a range of habitat improvement measures. This combined, community-based effort is an entirely new approach to environmental management compared to the randomised process of selection in previous agri-environment schemes.
Another innovative aspect is the use of a results-based payment scheme where farmers will have each habitat on their farm assessed and scored, with higher quality habitats gaining higher payments.
