18/4/2023

Wildlife and our food: the vital connection we've forgotten

By Prof. Chris Stoate, Allerton Project Head of Research

Farming With The EnvironmentAs a society, we have become disconnected, not just from the sources of our food, but from the very concept that the process of food production is integrated with countless wildlife species. In Chapter 3 of Farming with the Environment, I describe the results of our research into the role of life in soil that is used to grow food. Chapter 4 extends this to above ground wildlife – pollinating insects, crop pest predators, and other species that have evolved over millennia to share the farmed environment with us.

30 years of wildlife monitoring provide exceptional data for the Allerton Project’s farm at Loddington. We have also carried out research into habitat use by a wide range of species, including grass, hedge and woodland field boundary habitat use by crop pest predators such as spiders, and ground and rove beetles.

Our work on pollinating insects has revealed how their abundance today is limiting fruit-set in hedgerow shrubs such as blackthorn and hawthorn, and landscape scale surveys provide an insight into the enormous range in abundance of wild bees across a range of sites. We have used spatial models to estimate how wild bee numbers might have changed historically, but more importantly, how their numbers could be restored through future land use change.

Six species of grasshoppers and crickets have colonised the farm, largely in response to climate change, during the first 15 years of the project. Despite national declines in abundance of moths, our long-term monitoring shows that moth numbers have increased by more than a third at Loddington over the 30 years, with the number of species present also increasing by around 20%. Overall songbird numbers doubled within the first six years of the project and much of our research over the years has been on how songbirds use the land we are managing to produce food.

For example, song thrush nests that successfully produce young have a higher proportion of pasture grazed by sheep within their foraging range than failed nests, which have more arable land. Yellowhammers change from one crop to another through the nesting season when gathering food for their young, so crop diversity within the foraging range is likely to increase survival. We also have detailed information of the diet of many birds that forage for invertebrates on productive land during the breeding season.

Our research has shown that the land that we are managing to produce food is not just supporting wildlife, but that in some cases those species are increasing in abundance, many are beneficial to food production, while others are iconic species that we appreciate in their own right. Developing methods of further improving the farmed environment to benefit this full range of species is the subject of another chapter.

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Comments

Financial viabillity of wildlife conservation

at 9:13 on 26/04/2023 by Chris Stoate

Andrew Nicholas raises an important point. I discuss this issue in chapters 8 and 9 of my book.

Farming with the Environment

at 20:39 on 24/04/2023 by Andrew Nicholas

Very interesting blog by Professor Chris Stoate “wildlife and our food” dated 18th April 2023. I as an agricultural business consultant for 25 years have seen many farmers exit as output despite technological advances to increase yields have not kept up with inflation. Those farmers left in business have increased output by expanding to dilute fixed overheads and for livestock farming in particular dairying this is resulting in environmental pressures. I am very aware that farming needs to change to reduce intensification however as seen in the last 25 years and direct farming subsidies being removed I am not sure how economical it will be to hand over more land to biodiversity. Is there research and demonstration farms showing financial viability whilst restoring biodiversity?? Reports that I read seem to focus on the benefit of management on biodiversity restoration but not the impact on a farms finances. The challenge we have as consultants is that we are employed to ensure short and medium financial viability and this is difficult to achieve if we are taking land out of production however long term we are aware this is not environmentally sustainable. I welcome your thoughts and would be very interested in researching such a topic with the aim of knowledge exchange to farmers and land managers.

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