• PEF is an environmental cooperative launched in 2023 representing 77 farmers covering 40,000ha across the Dark Peak and South West Peak in partnership with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and the NFU
• The £100,000 funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund will help establish the PEF and fund baseline environmental surveys to show how its farmers can improve the precious habitats and heritage of the Peak District National Park
• The group is looking to secure a blend of agri-environment schemes and private finance to replace the loss of £millions in farm subsidies in the region and to fund a range of landscape-scale projects including rebuilding stone walls, restoring damaged peatland and planting new networks of hedgerows.

A £100,000 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund has been awarded to help establish the Peakland Environmental Farmers (PEF) group which currently represents 77 land managers covering 40,000 hectares in the Dark and Southwest Peaks. The central aims of the cooperative are nature recovery, peatland restoration, clean water and net zero by 2040. In the long term it is looking to replace the loss of farm subsidies by securing a blend of public and private finance to restore the precious habitats and heritage of the Peak District National Park.

The UK's leading wildlife research charity the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) is managing the National Lottery funded project. Chief executive Teresa Dent CBE said: "I am delighted that the Heritage Fund is supporting GWCT to help farmers and moorland managers in the Peak District create an Environmental Farmers Group that will aim to deliver substantial environmental outcomes over 40,000 hectares of land. This is just the beginning of what I am sure will be an exciting environmental journey. It is wonderful that National Lottery players have made that start-up possible."

Tom Noel, local farmer and chair of PEF said:

"We welcome the award as a ringing endorsement of the principle that, through collaborative working and with the right level of investment, farmers can achieve nature recovery alongside food production over a large scale, thereby meeting and beating government environmental targets. Farmers manage 72% of the UK countryside and so are vital to achieving the transformative change needed to meet the challenges of national biodiversity decline, climate change and restoring iconic landscapes."

The Heritage Fund grant will enable the PEF, which has so far been established on a largely voluntary basis, to attain legal standing, carry out ecological surveys of its members' land holdings and develop landscape-scale conservation plans. This will provide a platform from which the environmental cooperative aims to secure public funding through Environmental Land Management Schemes and private finance via natural capital markets to support long-term, large-scale projects such as rebuilding stone walls, restoring damaged peatland and planting new networks of hedgerows.

Chloe Palmer who facilitates two smaller Farmer Clusters within the larger PEF, Hope Valley and Bradfield Farmers, recently managed the distribution of 31,000 hedge plants as part of a project to plant 24km of hedgerows in four years. She said: "These new hedges will capture carbon, help prevent sediment run off polluting river systems and benefit a wide range of wildlife including threatened farmland birds such as song thrushes, linnets and tree sparrows. Further ahead we are looking forward engaging the wider Peak District community in initiatives to restore stone walls and moorland.

The work of the PEF will play a key role in delivering the aims of the Peak District National Park. Phil Mulligan, chief executive said: "The farmed landscape has been at the heart of the National Park for generations and remains inextricably linked to what we can deliver for nature recovery and climate change today. We are already at the forefront of key government tests on the transition to new environmental land management (ELM) approaches, along with administering significant grants through the Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) programme. This substantial Lottery funding to PEF will enable the farming community both as individuals and collaboratively to further strengthen the Peak District's leading role in demonstrating how the agricultural landscape can tackle the biggest environmental issues we currently face."