England’s chalk streams are among the rarest freshwater habitats on Earth, and farmers have a critical role to play in restoring them. EFG is proud to support a new partnership between the Winchester Downs Farmers Cluster (WDC) and the Upper Itchen Restoration Community Interest Company (UIR CIC), bringing together land managers and local citizen scientists to tackle water quality on the upper Itchen.
At the heart of the partnership is lab-quality water testing equipment funded through EFG’s capital grant from Rothamsted Research. This is the same approach already being used by farmer clusters allied to EFG across the Test, Waithe Beck and Hampshire Avon catchments, and part of a growing, EFG network of farmer-led water monitoring that is building one of the most comprehensive pictures of chalk stream health in England.
The programme will see UIR CIC’s volunteer citizen scientists collecting and analysing water samples on a weekly basis, at greater frequency and density than the Environment Agency’s official monitoring, providing a richer and more credible picture of nutrient contamination and its sources within the catchment.
This expansion into the Itchen reflects a central lesson from EFG’s Hampshire Avon Water Workshop in December 2025: that locally collected, high-frequency data, standardised and aggregated across catchments, is essential to understanding and addressing river pressures at scale. As EFG Board Member Tim Palmer noted at that workshop, “you cannot manage what you have not first measured.” The goal is not simply to monitor, but to move from evidence to action, identifying sources of pollution and delivering targeted, practical interventions on the ground.
By equipping clusters with the tools to monitor, understand and act on environmental data, we can move the conversation beyond compliance and toward genuine, measurable restoration. With sediment fingerprinting also planned for the future, the partnership has real ambition and the structure to deliver on it.
For further information please contact EFG:
| Robert Stent (Chair, WDC) www.winchesterdownscluster.co.uk | Ian Diver (Director, UIR CIC) www.upperitchenrestoration.org.uk |