What is ‘Functional Need’?
It is the aspects of a land based livelihood system that reasonably require people to be on site at most times of night or day in order to effectively manage the holding.
The assessment of ‘functional need’ has become a fundamental part of many land based livelihood enterprises as it is the central basis on which a justification to live on site is measured by the current planning system.
It is set out as one of the criteria by which Planning Authorities can guard against potential abuse of the planning system and regulate development within the open countryside.
We have built up a specialism in this area that seeks to address not only the issues surrounding such assessment but also how it can be effectively and accurately applied to smaller, low input and labour intensive systems.
An appreciation for cross enterprise relationships typical in such systems is an important factor in enabling a useful and relevant study of ‘functional need’.
In assessing the functional requirements our analysis attempts to reach an understanding of the complexity of relationships both across the holdings overall and the interplay between individual enterprises that make it up.
To this end we are cautious about using currently available industry standards in order to make an assessment of the hours necessary to carry out typical enterprises and other land based tasks on small scale intensively managed systems. This caution is born out of study and experience of small scale horticultural and livestock systems, from research carried here at the farm, from working with other small holders and from a knowledge of the diversity and complexity of established sustainable land use systems.
The tendency toward a strong reliance on human labour in place of fossil fuel dependent alternatives such as petro-chemical fertilizers, biocides and petroleum based combustion engines has a direct and significant impact on labour hours. This is one of the reasons that the use of agricultural industry standards for measuring labour hours in this setting is questionable.
In attempting to find a meaningful and realistic way to interpret agricultural systems such as these it is vital that concerted efforts are made to retrieve data specifically relevant to such systems.
They cannot be accurately or reliably measured using the same techniques as are commonly used, and often well suited to, more ‘conventional’ farm systems which lend themselves to a quantative assessment of relatively small numbers of inputs and outputs.
Small scale sustainable systems, which draw heavily on biological and ecological approaches to productivity are bristling with indirect relationships within the production system and also tend to be heavily influenced by personalised husbandry preferences. This can stretch even sophisticated multivariate approaches and would certainly leave more typical agricultural assessment techniques, used within much planning appraisal, incapable of drawing reliable or accurate conclusions.
As discussed above, the measurement of functional hours necessary to complete activities is a complex task and requires an in depth understanding of both the underlying principles of the scheme and of its day to day management.
Appreciative Inquiry techniques are used to gather information both on the tour of the site, in an initial interview with applicants and with subsequent interviews as we assess their system and its implicit requirements. This is then compiled into a spreadsheet which shows a full analysis of total labour demand within specific enterprises as well as those which involve an intrinsic ‘functional need’ to live on site.
All such data from individual holdings is also collated into a much larger database which allows us to generate a picture of averages and trends within the sector which helps to track the common themes of much small scale sustainable practice and, in time, will allow a more accurate appreciation of such schemes to be readily available to Planners.
Government Inspectors who have recently questioned the use of conventional agricultural methods of assessment in an unconventional setting have accepted our approach as suitably focused and detailed to address these, often hard to define, systems. We hope this will allow a reduction in the need for ‘special exceptions’ to be made when dealing with such proposals and for these to be replaced with a simply more applicable and accurate method of assessment.
Please contact us at consultancy@quietwatersfarm.co.uk if you need a functional need assessment as either a management tool or to form part of a planning application. We are also always glad to receive information from existing enterprises to help increase our database.