Blogs

When people think of wildflower meadows, they often picture colourful displays of orchids, knapweeds and oxeye daisies buzzing with pollinators. What is less obvious is the careful management required to create and maintain these habitats, and the important role that farmers play in ensuring they continue to support wildlife alongside productive agriculture.

Join the GWCT at this year's Game Fair at Ragley Hall on 24-26 July.  

This spring, we have established 6.7 hectares of AB9 Winter Bird Seed Mix across our 320-hectare farm at the GWCT Allerton Project in Loddington. 

Thanks to the generosity of our guests and supporters, the Foraging Feast successfully raised over £10,000 for the GWCT, an incredible achievement that will have a fantastic impact.

For many GWCT supporters, the importance of pollinators hardly needs explaining. So rather than rehearse the usual messages about bees and butterflies, perhaps it is more useful to ask: where should we be focusing our efforts if we want the biggest return for wildlife?

The new Minister of State for Food Security and Rural Affairs, Stephen Morgan, is to be welcomed into his important new role during one of the most consequential months in the department’s history – the rollout of what must, surely, be the final iteration of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) after a decade of arrested development and false starts under his six predecessors.

Across the farmland sites that the GWCT monitors for insects, 2025 will likely be remembered not simply as a poor year for insects, but as a revealing one. 

Counts this year showed the largest year-on-year increase recorded in 35 years of monitoring. With numbers of black grouse males recorded at leks on these 18 estates increased from 557 males in 2025 to 894 this spring, a 61% increase, with some eastern moors reporting record highs.  

On a surprisingly sunny afternoon during an otherwise extremely wet week in early June, a group of South Yorkshire farmers dedicated to grey partridge recovery gathered for a farm walk to celebrate their farmer cluster’s successes so far.

Too often we sit in our various roles, comfortable in the knowledge we have and the language we use, without considering how others might perceive what we are saying or even understand.