Allerton Project Research Blog

As 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.

Last week, applications opened for the 2024 Countryside Stewardship Mid Tier scheme, providing grants to farmers and land managers to improve the wildlife potential of their land and enhance their natural capital. The scheme supports a range of enhanced environmental outcomes from restoring wildlife habitats and creating woodlands, to managing flood risk.

The health of our soil literally and metaphorically underlies the ecosystem on which we all depend. Not least, it is fundamental to farming.

This is the first of a sequence of blog posts based on chapters from Farming with the Environment: Thirty Years of Allerton Project Research. Logically enough, I am starting at the beginning, not the beginning of the Allerton Project, but the earliest evidence we have for agricultural activity on the farm at Loddington in Leicestershire.

The production and application of non-nitrogen fertilisers adds a further 10% to our average farm’s GHG footprint. From this we can see that optimisation and reduction of the use of fertilisers holds the key to reducing the climate impact of arable production.

Joe Stanley reports on another successful Open Farm Sunday at the Allerton Project.

Once again, growers have been struggling in recent weeks with what has been for most yet another prolonged period of dry weather, broken only sporadically and in postcode lottery fashion by heavy showers winging in from the Atlantic.

Alastair Leake, GWCT Head of Policy, explains more about a project to establish a Hedgerow Carbon Code that benefits carbon storage and biodiversity.

The crop drill has been busy here at Loddington, with farmers across the country relieved to experience a ‘normal’ autumn drilling season for the first time since 2018 – or at least a ten day window into which frenzied work has been committed!