The Allerton Project's first 25 years: a rich seam of evidence to support farmland conservation

Abstract

New agricultural and agri-environmental policies in Britain could have a substantial impact on the farms that produce our food and influence the abundance and diversity of our wildlife. The way farmland is managed influences our water, the control of flood risk, the character of our landscapes and the impacts on climate change, as well as wildlife and the quantity and quality of the food we eat. Given their fundamental importance, and the complexities involved in these multiple interactions, it is essential that the development of new land-use policy should be evidence-based and not simply derive from political ideology. Twenty-five years of research at the Allerton Project, in Leicestershire, provide a rich seam of evidence to inform this process.

The project's farm, at Loddington, sits in what is now a mixed farming landscape typical of lowland Britain. It has an undulating topography, areas of woodland and clay soils. Archaeological evidence indicates that the area has been occupied and managed since Neolithic times. Small Roman farmsteads gave way to what became a substantial village with widespread cultivation in medieval times, only to decline in the 14th century and revert to grass for the next 600 years (Stoate 2010).