The National Meadow Groups Conference 2024 took place in Norbury, Shropshire on Friday 15 November. It was organised and hosted by Marches Meadow Group, Middle Marches Community Land Trust and the Shropshire Hills National Landscape.
It was a busy day with a full schedule of presentations and, in the afternoon, a session devoted to small-group discussion and then a coming-together to collate views and ideas.
Presentations were made by representatives from the Shropshire Hills Landscape Trust, Ceredigion Local Nature Partnership, Plantlife, Herefordshire Meadows, Carmarthenshire Meadows Group, the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, and Josh Styles, who runs an ecology consultancy working in the Liverpool area.
The overall theme of the event was Management Of Meadow Groups. Topics addressed and discussed were those that most meadows groups confront at one point or another – what structure to adopt (charity / community group / other type of informal association?); funding, both for everyday costs and for longer-term project work; initiatives undertaken by various groups (see, for example, the Carmarthenshire Meadow Group’s Big Meadow Survey: https://www.bigmeadowsearch.co.uk/about ... r-bms-book ; and, from Plantlife, progress on their work on policy and legislation. Plantlife is trying to get all three UK legislatures that have agricultural powers (England and NI, Wales, Scotland) to adopt grassland action plans to match those already developed for trees and peat.
The final discussion session focused on some core issues, namely what should be happening at national level in terms of forming and managing a meadows group network and who should take this forward, and how local groups might individually progress on their issues and feed into the network more generally.
There were some good responses and some varied answers to specific points, but there was also a general consensus around the notion that Plantlife should be the coordinating body for a meadows groups network. The Plantlife representative had left by the time this solution was arrived at. Whether it will be positively received when reported back to that organisation remains to be seen. The issue will, nevertheless, be pursued. Lots of individual meadows groups can achieve much. Working together with some coordination across particular issues can achieve much more and the time seems to have come to establish a functioning network.