GWCT News Blog

The GWCT is delighted that the headline of the EFRA report following its soil health inquiry is that government should take soil health as seriously as it does our other critical assets of water and air.

At its heart, FRAMEwork is about sharing ideas, inspiring new approaches, and collaborating to make farmland biodiversity conservation possible on the ground. This occurred in March when the GWCT team hosted the projects’ annual meeting.

When you think of the GWCT, images of pheasants, partridges, and maybe even lapwings come to mind. But there’s something we deeply care about that might surprise you: soil.

Supplementary feeding has become a widespread management tool for declining farmland birds. In the countryside in late winter there is often not enough natural seed food, which causes a hungry gap between February and April when lots of birds die of starvation.

The GWCT Allerton Project is looking for ten wheat farmers in the Nestlé/Purina supply chain in the East (Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Northants) to work together to baseline, trial, train, benchmark, network and innovate their way towards net zero.

A new ‘Wildlife Plot’ agri-environment option, which promises to be one of the best yet for biodiversity, has been developed as part of the GWCT’s PARTRIDGE Project on the Rotherfield Estate in Hampshire.

Research shows that allocating just 2.2% of a farm to flower-rich habitat more than doubled the density of bumblebee colonies, which in turn boosts productivity.

This summer is the first season of fieldwork for the Framework project. The project has helped support the setup of 11 Farmer Clusters across various European countries and is looking at the impact of landscape-scale management on farmland wildlife over a five-year period.

The use of pesticides is hotly debated, but arguments around it are often absolute and lack nuance. The government derogation for farmers to use the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam on sugar beet this year (dependent on evidence of potentially yield threatening levels of pests) created lots of headlines, plenty of outrage and, at the time of writing, 50,597 signatures to reverse the decision.

The original blog we wrote has, not surprisingly, generated some comment, particularly with respect to the suggestion of a derogation on its use on kale in wild bird cover.