Common Land, Sorted: How Flockarewe Digitises Shared Grazing, Stints and Turnout

Britain has around 1.3 million acres of common land — the open hills, moors and greens where several farmers hold ancient rights to graze the same ground. It's some of our most beautiful and most environmentally important land, and it is very often run on paper: a register in a filing cabinet, a stocking limit nobody can police in real time, and a WhatsApp group for when something goes wrong. Flockarewe was built to change that — to give commoners, associations and graziers a live, shared, honest picture of who and what is actually on the hill. Last updated: August 2026. What "shared grazing" actually involves On a common, grazing isn't a free-for-all — it's a web of rights. Each grazier (a "commoner") holds a defined entitlement, often measured in stints or headage: how many ewes, cattle or ponies they may turn out, sometimes only in certain months. A commoners' association or committee oversees it: a total stocking limit to protect the ground, turnout and removal dates, and the expectation that graziers are active — actually using their rights, not sitting on them. Get it right and the hill thrives. Get it wrong — overstocking, undergrazing, absent "ghost" graziers, stock straying across boundaries — and you get environmental damage, subsidy problems and disputes that can run for years. Why paper can't keep up The traditional tools were never built for a live commons: No live picture. A paper register says who is entitled to graze — not who is actually out there today, or with how many head. Stocking limits you can't police. If the total limit is 800 ewes, who's counting, and when? Disputes on hearsay. "Your stock are on my side again" is impossible to resolve without evidence. Compliance is a scramble. Turnout dates, headage and active-use records for stewardship schemes mean digging through notebooks at the worst possible time. How Flockarewe digitises the commons Flockarewe puts the whole common on one live map, shared between every grazier and the association, with the tracking hardware doing the counting: Who's actually grazing. GPS collars and ear tags show, in real time, whose stock are on the hill and where — so "active grazier" stops being an honour system and becomes a fact. Stocking limits, live. Headage against entitlement, per grazier and for the whole common, so the committee can see at a glance whether the ground is within its limit. Turnout and removal, logged automatically. Dates and numbers recorded as stock go on and come off — the paperwork for schemes and audits writes itself. Boundaries and strays. Alerts when stock cross onto neighbouring land, a road or a sensitive habitat — the difference between a quick recovery and a dispute. A shared, honest record. Every commoner and the association see the same data, so disagreements are settled by the map, not by who shouts loudest. Records ready for funding. Active-use, headage and turnout evidence for Countryside Stewardship, ELM and cross-compliance, exported when you need it. It's the piece no general livestock app offers — because most were built for a single farm with a single boss, not a shared resource with a dozen stakeholders and a thousand years of custom. The hardware underneath None of this works without knowing where the animals are, and that comes down to the trackers on their necks and ears. On open, remote commons the choice between a farm-owned LoRaWAN network and 4G cellular really matters — for battery life, coverage and cost — which we break down in LoRa vs 4G GPS livestock trackers. Flockarewe is built to take data from both, so an association can mix a shared LoRaWAN gateway on the common with cellular tags for the animals that roam furthest. If you want the wider tour — flock registers, health and lambing alerts, everyday tracking — start with our full Flockarewe walk-through. This piece is about the part that's genuinely new: governing a shared resource with live data instead of paper and goodwill. Who it's for Commoners' associations and graziers' committees, national parks and AONBs, upland and hill farmers on shared grazing, and the land agents and advisers who administer it. Anywhere several people graze one piece of ground and need to trust the numbers. Getting started Tell us about your common — how many graziers, roughly how much ground, and whether there's any mobile signal on it — and we'll show you how Flockarewe and the right trackers fit together. Explore the platform at flockarewe.com, or talk to our UK team. Free UK delivery on trackers over £75; trade pricing for farms, associations and estates.