Land pools and farming income for the East of England regenerative transition. First working slice, auto-deployed — hectares through to revenue change, rebuilt from the workbook and checked against Phase 1.
1 · Land pools
Farms commit their arable, not their whole holding. That arable splits three ways at entry, and nothing downstream is allowed to invent a hectare. The check column is the pools less the programme total and must be nil.
| Cohort | Programme ha | 1 Cropped | 2 Uncropped | 3 Nature | Check |
|---|
1.1 · Cohorts over time
Cohorts stack as they join, then decay at the dropout rate, because the model currently does not replace farmers who leave. The peak is the year the last cohort enters.
2 · Farming income
Three things move revenue between the conventional baseline and the transition farm. Phase 1 modelled only the first: it held the crop mix fixed and assumed no revenue at all from the break crop.
3 · Landscape
Per-hectare revenue change multiplied by each cohort's surviving hectares. The trough is what a farmer-facing instrument has to carry before the landscape turns positive.
4 · Audit
Every intermediate value on the path from a cohort's committed arable to a pound of wheat revenue, so the chain can be checked on paper rather than taken on trust. Cream and blue means the figure comes from the assumptions registry.
Crop mix, baseline against transition rotation.
5 · Against Phase 1
Phase 1 is the Deloitte and Palladium work. It is a benchmark and a statement of intent, not a correct model. Every difference is recorded rather than quietly absorbed.
Base-case yield change against baseline is identical to Phase 1: wheat −10%, −5%, 0, +5%, +10% then flat; the other crops −2%, +2.25%, +6.5%, +10.75%, +15% then flat. Low and high scenarios are new.
Phase 1 ran five equal cohorts of 49,835 ha entering 2026–2030. This model runs four ramping cohorts from 2027, sized by farm counts, on the basis that recruitment ramps rather than arriving in equal slices.
Year-on-year hectares are therefore not directly comparable.
Phase 1 derived farm counts by multiplying total farms by the share of hectares on large holdings (86.65%) rather than the share of holdings that are large (33.7%), so its 1,380 / 265 split is not a farm count. This model types farm counts and derives hectares from the Defra size bands.
Phase 1 put 10% of area into fallow and assumed no revenue from it. This model grows beans and peas on 20% of the transition rotation and sells them.
That is more generous than Phase 1, but still negative against the conventional baseline: beans and peas earn less per hectare than the wheat they displace. It is the crop mix step in the bridge above.
Phase 1 uses 4.4 t/ha (spring oats); this model uses 6.2 t/ha (winter oats). The workbook flags the variety difference but does not settle it. Oats are 3.1% of the rotation, so the effect is small — but they are not the same crop.
Phase 1 explicitly excluded price premiums, carbon, biodiversity net gain and every alternative revenue stream. Its £130.6m gap is the gap with no commercial revenue at all. This model exists to close part of that gap with contracted premiums and nature revenue, so the two figures must not be set against each other until the exclusions are matched.