By Hugh Oliver-Bellasis, Manydown landowner and GWCT Trustee
This story starts with a boy growing up in the 1950s, on an estate called Manydown in the north of Hampshire. The family farmed and thus the boy learnt to shoot. The boy spent much of his time with gamekeepers, this being a safe way for parents to rid themselves of boisterous children. This time was formative, and footprints were left. In my case unwittingly, the footprint was the grey partridge. The farm consisted of three keepered beats, and lay on the edge of the South Downs – it was proper partridge country and they were part of the farming landscape. In 1962 I left school and went to RMA Sandhurst, and this was followed by 17 years of army service.
Returning to Manydown in 1978, I was immediately aware that something had changed. Farming was different, and one effect was that there were far fewer partridges than before. Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring, published in 1962, warned the world about the dangers of using chemicals to control pests. However, the spectre of food rationing from two world wars meant that her warnings were largely dismissed in favour of greater agricultural production. On top of this, the UK’s accession to the Common Market brought a changed subsidy structure. Deficiency payments disappeared, and production became the main aim, which was well rewarded. Mechanisation increased apace; horses and ricks had gone, tractors and grain stores had arrived. This increased production was supported with the use of plant protection chemicals and we all worshipped the gods of production and yield.
I had noticed many changes, but some things had not changed. The keepers still controlled predators, hedges were still present and well managed. There may have been more pheasants, but not many, but crop production and efficacy were very different. The flock of Hampshire Downs sheep had gone, and with them stubble turnips in autumn. Spring crops had mostly gone, being replaced by higher yielding new winter varieties that were increasingly being sown in the autumn, meaning the loss of stubble fields over winter. Spring barley undersown with grass for herbage remained on the farm, and new crops like oilseed rape became part of the rotation.
Dick Potts and the GCT
In 1979, I had a meeting with Charles Coles, the Director at the then Game Conservancy, which developed into a discussion with the Director of Research, the partridge expert Dr Dick Potts. He had been conducting monitoring work in Sussex with Drs Paul Vickerman and Keith Sunderland since 1968, which was designed to measure the impact of changes in farming on the fauna and flora of arable land. Because of the detailed data collection and uninterrupted time-span (with annual sampling of insects in cereal crops since 1968), the Sussex Study allowed sophisticated analyses of the environmental impact and conservation implications of topical issues like climate change and pesticide use.
After more than a decade, clear evidence was emerging that the insects that young partridge chicks feed on (the so-called chick-food insects) were in decline, and this was likely to be a big part of the reason the partridges themselves were declining. It became clear that this needed to be rigorously tested at a meaningful scale on a commercial farm.
If Dick’s hypothesis was correct and insects were crucially important to grey partridge chicks, what could be done to support them without a major impact on crop production? The double hit of modern pesticide use was that insecticides directly removed the chick-food insects, while herbicides removed their host plants (chick-food insects primarily feed on weeds in crops). However, along with the development of herbicides came the dogma that only clean crops were good crops. Cleanliness was next to godliness. There was no environmental awareness in the public. In fact, any such notion was ridiculed. Farmers were rapidly becoming agri-businessmen who did not believe that anything they did to grow a big crop of wheat could possibly harm wildlife. Fortunately, Dick and his Sussex team were 15 years ahead of their time.
At this time a young entomology student, Nick Sotherton, was completing his PhD at Southampton University on the knotgrass beetle (Gastrophysa), one that featured abundantly in the diet of young partridge chicks. His PhD was sponsored by the GCT at Fordingbridge. From this work, it became clear that Gastrophysa was declining. It only feeds, lays its eggs and rears its young on two species of broad-leaved weed: knotgrass and black bindweed. Both weed species were targets of the new herbicide chemistry on the market. Relying on only two weeds to survive in a weed-free environment is not a winning conservation strategy. This was a result of modern agriculture using herbicides. Knotgrass is a very difficult agricultural weed capable of blocking tines on cultivators and smothering the ground, so to many it was a pest weed that needed to be removed from modern crops.
So here we have the emerging dilemma: a bird needing insects for its chicks in the summer, and farmers removing the plants on which these insects rely. Livestock management was changing too, and the acreage of grassland was diminishing as arable became more profitable. The production of silage increased, which threatened ground-nesting birds like the partridge because the machinery moved so fast that birds had no chance to escape. At the same time a big switch to winter cereals was impacting on spring cereals, and the practice of undersowing that was part of traditional rotations was decreasing nationally. That in itself did not seem to be a problem, except that another important chick-food insect, the sawfly, thrived on undersowing both for the sown grasses that were its host plant and for the lack of soil disturbance. Sawfly caterpillars pupate underground and are destroyed by ploughing, which was a part of the new regime. Sawfly larvae are probably the most important insect food of partridge chicks because they are relatively large, high in protein and live in habitats that partridges favour. They too were in decline.
Dick was convinced that the problem lay in the intensification of agricultural practices. He was the son of a farmer and countryman, and his observations were running alongside a highly tuned instinct. However, his hypothesis needed testing at farm level. How to find a farmer and farm where there were still some partridges left, that would let him manipulate crops and where real keepering and good nesting cover management was still in place?
The Cereals and Gamebirds Research Project
At the time, I was discussing the diminishing stock of partridges at Manydown with Dick. Before the war, partridges were abundant at Manydown; now numbers were declining. Our spring breeding density fell from 18 to 5 pairs per km2 over this time. Because Manydown was part of the Partridge Count Scheme run by the GWCT, we knew this was not unique to our farm but represented a national trend. Partridges were declining across the country.
I asked Dick what he thought we should do. He said all that was needed was an experiment on a farm scale. The core would be unsprayed headlands; little did I realise how unwise it was at that time to even mention anything ‘unsprayed’. In 1982, the first headland manipulation experiment was carried out. The Manydown Farm Manager was a patient individual called Allen Dabinett. He nervously accepted the scale of the experiment and its probable implications. As a backdrop, there was considerable data about partridges at Manydown, as there had been spring pair counts and autumn stubble counts for some years giving a clear baseline database. The result of not spraying headlands was a big rise in chick survival, but along with that came some headlands that were very weedy and so difficult to combine – impractical for modern farming. It became clear this was no easy nut to crack.
However, out of this first experiment grew the germ of an idea to set up a project where farmers joined and paid an acreage payment for membership. A Suffolk farmer, John Wilson, who had worked with Dick over many years was central to this new approach becoming a reality. It was called the Cereals and Gamebirds Research Project (CGRP), and started in 1983. The target supporters were farmers who still had grey partridges but were unable to shoot them as the numbers were too low.
The aims were simple:
- To provide practical management plans for conserving gamebirds and other wildlife on arable farms, without compromising standards of cereal grain production. Research was needed to show how habitat improvement and moderation in pesticide use could be employed with the greatest benefit.
- To offer alternatives to total reliance on pesticides in arable farming, by encouraging valuable predatory insects, which can help to prevent aphid pest outbreaks. Research was needed to identify pesticides that did the least harm to these beneficial insects.
Thus began a project that would transform cereal production and wildlife conservation forever. The Game Conservancy Trust could not fund this work from its core funds but agreed to ‘host’ the project if the money was raised independently. Over the next three years, 500 farmers and landowners joined the project and nearly a million pounds was raised. The selective spraying of crop edges, now called conservation headlands, was born. Integrated pest management, crop management and farm management became real – the role of beneficial insects was recognised, accepted and taken seriously industry wide, entirely due to the CGRP project.
CGRP sought to work closely with the agrochemical companies that were researching and developing new herbicides and insecticides. We needed more specificity: herbicides that would take out the grass weeds but leave the broad-leaved species; and insecticides that would take out the cereal aphids but leave the chick-food insects and beneficial predatory insects. This level of specificity was barely recognised as valuable, as industry wisdom had been to manufacture broad spectrum products for a world market.
Manydown’s agronomist was one Alan Bide who, with his business partner Seamus Foster, was at the cutting edge of providing good advice on pesticide use. They immediately warmed to the idea, and although there were some torrid discussions, they were supportive and helped develop this new approach. The farming industry generally was not inclined to follow, however, and many big farming businesses openly spurned the need for such research, let alone the change in management it would lead to. In fact, the whole approach was ridiculed by all but a few. Concerns about the effects of emerging commercial farm practice were not recognised as important. The GCT was engaged in finding solutions. The next step was to test the effects of conservation headlands.
The experiment involved Dr Mike Rands using radio telemetry to track partridge broods once they hatched. Manydown Farm was divided up into the three gamekeeper beats and each beat divided into two. Within pairs, each half was randomly allocated to a treatment: spray the cereal crop edges right up to the hedge bottom as usual, or leave the outermost six metres unsprayed. This was experimental conservation ecology on a grand scale, a scale very few are privileged to perform. In some pairs of plots, over 100 hectares of cereal crops had their crop edges left unsprayed. This showed clearly the benefit of crop headlands receiving lower pesticide impacts.
Partridge chick survival improved where chicks had access to insect-rich conservation headlands. The roost sites of broods were found, faecal samples collected and insect parts identified to categorise what insect had been eaten during the previous day. The numbers of insects between crops with our managed headlands was compared to those that were fully treated. The difference was stark, even when insecticides were still used but just herbicides were omitted. Great experimental rigour was needed with these experiments, so we needed to go into a second year. Also, at this time, there were many who did not want this work to succeed, not the pesticide companies nor the regulatory authorities. So, in year two, to confound the critics who accused us of putting the conservation headlands on the best parts of the farm, we simply reversed the treatments. Those areas fully sprayed in year one became conservation headlands in year two and vice versa. In year two partridge chick survival continued to improve.
At this time the conventional wisdom in crop management was to pre-emptively spray a summer insecticide when the crop was receiving its last fungicide. Unfortunately, this was at just the time when partridge chicks needed abundant insects to eat. Most available insecticides were broad spectrum, therefore killing chick-food insects as well as crop pests. The only product that was specific to aphids was Pirimicarb (trade name Aphox) from ICI Plant Protection. However, this product was comparatively very expensive and therefore, there had been a marked reluctance by farmers to use it. This alerted the project scientist Nick Sotherton to another challenge farmers were facing: deciding between care of the environment and profitable farming. On the one hand they could reduce cost and streamline activity in all areas, but choosing environmental responsibility meant being faced with increasing cost using more expensive products to look after farmland wildlife. No wonder big farming contractors thought I was both mad and dangerous.
It was becoming clear that, far from Dick Pott’s hypothesis being fragile, as some had suggested, it was hugely powerful. Inadvertently, farmers had been ripping the heart out of the ecological food chain through the indirect effects of pesticides, not to mention their direct effects. This was not a failure of the regulatory system, it was a complex set of consequences, which had not been contemplated, nor anticipated. With hindsight this demonstrates potently that applied science is crucial to the farming industry because it is the coming together of basic science and practical crop production. The project was assuming an importance that would only be fully recognised many years later.
The Project Steering Committee suggested that, whilst grey partridges were the epicentre of our research effort, that butterflies, harvest mice, songbirds, wildflowers and beneficial insects should also be investigated within the scope of the project. It would be a waste not to use a farm test bed to investigate the effects on other species in other parts of the ecosystem. Thus, we had to redouble our fundraising efforts to be able to fulfil these new research priorities. The work on rare arable wildflowers was funded by the trade body of the UK pesticide industry, but it is worth noting that most of the money raised came from farmers and landowners – so much for the accusation that farmers do not care or love their land!
Suddenly trouble loomed – with the switch to winter cereals came the increased threat of cereal fungal diseases such as net blotch and mildew. There was a product called Missile, which was an organo-phosphate-based chemical called pyrazophos and was effective against fungus. However, it was also a powerful insecticide. The manufacturers were selling it as a fungicide with insecticidal properties. The CGRP was extremely unhappy with this position and the regulators could not act because this was work in progress. The project decided to take on the manufacturer and, after some very nervous moments in a true David and Goliath situation, along with some clear field trials that proved its insecticidal activity, the manufacturer backed down and labelled it as an insecticide. This was a defining moment. It may have been the first time a product was relabelled for ecological reasons.
This success accelerated the necessity to look at all insecticides available for use in cereal crops to determine what they actually targeted. The work had useful results, showing the variation between products from absolute specificity to differing levels of activity. None of these results had been available in the past. Until now, the conservation organisations were advising to only use the pesticides that are safe to wildlife – as much use as a chocolate teapot! Of the 100+ chemicals approved for use in UK cereals, which ones were ‘safe’ to beneficial insects or their host plants? Nobody knew.
Bringing change to industry
With Nick Sotherton’s continued dynamic leadership, CGRP conducted the research and we named names. We told farmers which insecticides killed ladybirds and which did not. We published the list of specific herbicides approved for use on our headlands, we identified the specificity of Aphox as an insecticide, and we screened all the fungicides so that there were no other “missiles” (fungicides with strong insecticidal properties) on the approved list. The quid pro quo with manufacturers was we would list the products we liked alongside the list of those we didn’t, if we had the science to prove it. The end game was to address the specificity of the other insecticides.
Work continued to refine the pesticide list for conservation headlands, to enable broad-leaved weeds to remain as hosts for insects, whilst removing others. This work was led by Dr Nigel Boatman, a classically trained weed scientist. Grass weeds were of little ecological value and were serious contaminants of cereal crops. In addition, work was being done to look at herbicide specificity, to enable some of the least desirable broad-leaved weeds to be selectively removed.
Cleavers are a good example: they are difficult to clean out of grain after harvest because of their size and shape. Cleavers are also are very good nitrogen converters; they are highly competitive and grow abundantly and thickly in hedgerows; they suffocate other plants and ruin the hedge whilst acting as a source of contamination to the crop. Fortunately, the chemical company BASF discovered a molecule called Quinmerac (coded 518H), which was cleaver-specific. The project assessed its capability and found it was brilliant, highly cleaver-specific, and without killing chick-food insect host plants. However, BASF did not consider it marketable as a single molecule. Many years later, I wonder if that was the right decision, as cleavers continue to be a real challenge.
During this period, and whilst the core work was continuing, side projects were starting on wood mice, wild flowers, songbirds and butterflies. A number of fascinating facts emerged from these studies, not least that wood mice travelled anything up to 2km each night to find food. Weight for weight, that is similar to a human being travelling 3,600 miles on foot in the jungle at night to find food!
It is said that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, and this is indeed the case with many arable plants. Some previously common plants are now rare, whereas once they were serious agricultural weeds, blocking the knives of binders and mould boards of ploughs. Now those same plants are deemed to be of conservation concern. Conservation headlands gave a lifeline to their survival, but few could afford to manage crops in a way that enabled them to survive.
The songbird and the butterfly story were similar. Butterflies were particularly influenced by insecticide use, and the effects of drift in minute quantities were found to be damaging. It became clear that attention to detail in this area could enhance populations of hedgerow butterflies dramatically. Songbirds needed food close to their nest sites and, where otherwise they would have been forced to travel long distance to find very little food, conservation headlands gave them the resources they needed, where they needed them, at the critical time.
Thus, the use of conservation headlands was shown to have a beneficial effect. The problem remained persuading farmers to utilise them. That is as true today as it was in 1989.
Enter Allerton
Then there was an event that was to change the GCT’s ability to conduct farmland research. In 1990, Lord and Lady Allerton left their farm at Loddington in Leicestershire to the Trust for research and education purposes. The Allerton Research and Education Trust (ARET) was born and has never looked back. Now, 25 years later, it has an enviable reputation for good farming and excellent research that is available to the many annual visitors and through GWCT publications.
Conducting large-scale experiments on a commercial farm is a risk no matter how willing or interested the host estate, or how deep their pockets are. So, the GCT was relatively risk-averse in how radical it allowed experiments to become, wishing to avoid too much financial impact for their hosts. If the experiments lead to agronomic meltdowns, the Trust was not expected to pay! Also, the nature of scientific experiments is that only one variable at a time is manipulated. At Manydown it was pesticides on conservation headlands. The work on predation and nesting cover was conducted elsewhere at two separate venues. But, sooner or later, the Trust needed to put the management package (insects for chicks, increased nesting cover and predator control) all together in one place at one time. The opportunity to do so came with the acquisition of 300 hectares of farmland at Loddington. If such large-scale change led to a loss then the Trust should bear it, and so the CGRP morphed into ARET.
The foundation of ARET coincided with the first government conservation scheme, Countryside Stewardship, in 1991. The ARET farm at Loddington was interesting because it was in something of a time warp, having not embraced many contemporary farming practices. This was fortuitous for the GCT, because it enabled a rigorous programme of research and demonstration starting from an almost pre-plant protection position. Since the aim was to improve farmland biodiversity based on a commercial farm this was perfect, given the ten years of experience at Manydown.
During the mid-1990s, when ARET was reaching its peak habitat management performance, a ministerial visit saw the minister announce that what he saw was what agri-environment should be. Of the 36 arable options in the English agri-environment scheme, seven are entirely based on the work originating from the GWCT, many of these researched at Manydown, with a further 23 options benefitting from our research. CGRP had reached into UK farming policy. Biodiversity could be enhanced on farmland, and from a relatively poor starting point, farmland biodiversity improved. In addition, it provided invaluable data to advise farmers on the practices needed to increase songbirds, hares and lowland game.
In 1997, the Experimental Husbandry Farms (EHF) of ADAS were discontinued at perhaps just the time they were most needed, thus leaving the industry with a very limited applied science base, but catapulting the GCT’s Allerton Research and Education Trust firmly into the limelight; a position that it has continued to occupy and justify.
As ARET developed, so the breadth of work increased. Here was a working farm, which was comparable to hundreds of thousands of arable acres around lowland Britain. This ensured that the evidence gathered was relevant and useful to many, not least to the government in forming conservation or agri-environment schemes. Their work was kept honest because, as research blossomed into different areas of work, being carried out on a commercial farm meant that the farming partner rightly queried every move.
However, the GCT was perceived by policy makers as a shooting organisation, and policymakers were nervous about the connection. This prompted a debate that was to continue for some years – should the charity change its name? The results of much of the scientific research showed that, even if the original target species of a management technique was a gamebird, the benefit spilt over to other birds, plants, insects and farmland biodiversity. It demonstrated clearly the value of enlightened self-interest. Other organisations with similar charitable purposes, albeit focused on different areas, often suggested reasons why GCT solutions were not the answer. If those organisations had taken a pragmatic stance, doubtless farmland biodiversity would be significantly more abundant than it is today. That is sad.
So, what of the future? The GWCT continues to be funded mainly by private individuals, just as farmers funded CGRP all those years ago. The GWCT is still researching many practices and management options that are useful to farmers and wildlife today and for tomorrow. The influence of the organisation should be judged against its delivery. Clearly the influence it has had on government policy in relation to ELS and HLS is huge, and the same may well be true with future agri-environment schemes.
If you have not visited Loddington, go soon. It is hugely impressive.
Please, at the very least, join the GWCT.