Allerton Project Research Blog

At the Allerton Project, the research team aim to measure some of the ecosystem benefits of agroforestry and set them into a realistic farming example.

2026 sees the GWCT’s Big Farmland Bird Count return to its spiritual home of the Allerton Project, the GWCT’s research and demonstration farm on the Leicestershire-Rutland border, where it was originally launched in 2014.

The GWCT’s Allerton Project Training Team  has been awarded the contract by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to deliver the Government’s new Baseline Agricultural Training programme for its internal staff for the next four years.

Joe Stanley shares his transformative journey at the Allerton Project, advocating sustainable farming practices, addressing obstacles to adoption, and emphasising the need for greater support across the food supply chain.

Professor Chris Stoate looks back on the Allerton Project’s achievements as he steps down as its Head of Research.

The annual monitoring of breeding songbirds at the Allerton Project now represents a long-term dataset spanning 33 years. Overall songbird numbers remain around 70% higher than they were at the start of the project in 1992.

This week saw another significant and exciting development in the life of the Allerton Project: we opened our newly build accommodation to our first guests – very fittingly GWCT staff coming to help with our research work.

I recently returned from the biennial EURAF European Agroforestry Conference in the Czech Republic. My train from Vienna was cancelled because of exceptionally severe flooding in Austria and southern Germany so that I arrived home a day late. It was a relatively minor inconvenience. The flooding resulted in fatalities, river levels rising to their highest level in a century, and the Danube being closed to shipping.

Over Agroforestry Open Weekend 2024 we will be open Friday 17th May 1.00 – 3.00pm

We all have vested interests. Sometimes they can be a driver for good. There are some opportunities to be realised through adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, but we need to accept that there are sacrifices too, and individuals vary in their willingness to embrace this for the greater good.