Celebrating diversity

Well, that’s it then. As from today, I am no longer the Allerton Project’s Head of Research. I will be continuing to facilitate the local farmer cluster and related landscape scale initiatives, as well as spending more time on my own farm, working with my wife as we do our best to meet environmental and economic objectives, and perhaps some social ones too.

We have achieved some great things at the Allerton Project in the past three decades. Our research has helped to influence management at the farm scale across countless farms in the UK and abroad, as well as informing national policy on a range of issues.

The farm at Loddington supports a good range of bird species, largely due to the diversity of habitats across the farm. By applying an evidence based targeted approach to management, we doubled the abundance of those birds.

Our approach is not about food production or wildlife, or other environmental considerations; it is the integration of all of these, often with small, very different components playing an important role. Small pockets of semi-natural habitat in the landscape have been important for species diversity of wild bees, and small carefully sited ponds have been instrumental in increasing the number of aquatic plant species at the landscape scale.

Diversity has also been a feature of our research programme. We have covered topics as wide ranging as songbird ecology, beneficial predatory invertebrates and pollinators, soil health and management, arable crops and grasses, aquatic ecology, catchment processes and flood risk management, greenhouse gas emissions, agroforestry, and ruminant nutrition. And social science has been in the mix too, recognising the wide-ranging attitudes, approaches and aspirations of individual farmers. All this in the context of food-producing farming systems. We have only achieved this by collaborating with a wide range of specialist researchers from universities and other organisations.

I am grateful to have been working within an organisation that has not been too constrained by cultural norms, allowing individuals to work in ways that enable them to be creative and optimise their own performance. The value of neurodiversity is increasingly recognised.

There are some amazing young (and some not so young) people taking up the reins, with a diverse range of skills and working methods. If I have one tip for them, it is this: don’t be afraid to push at boundaries and make mistakes, but be sure to learn from them. Remember those lessons, and, importantly, forget the mistakes!

Thanks to all those knowledgeable, skilful and sometimes gloriously individual research partners and colleagues who have contributed so much to Allerton Project research over the years, and good luck to those who are taking the research programme forwards.

Allerton Project songbirds - migratory warblers

The annual monitoring of breeding songbirds at the Allerton project now represents a long-term dataset spanning thirty-three years. Overall songbird numbers remain around 70% higher than they were at the start of the project in 1992.

This long-term dataset provides an exceptional insight into how bird numbers can respond to suitable management at the farm scale. From this annual monitoring, combined with more intensive research, we know that some species are influenced by predator numbers, others by the availability of food in winter, and others directly by the habitat available to them. There are also interactions between these various influences.

Other species have been affected by processes operating beyond the farm boundary, at the regional and national scales. For these species, farm scale management is unlikely to have an influence on local breeding numbers.

For migratory species, factors operating in the wintering areas, or on migration routes, play an important role, but again, the extent to which this is the case varies between species, including those that are closely related and share similar niches in their breeding range. My research in West Africa some years ago sheds light on this and we have recently produced a research brief summarising the findings in the context of birds monitored at the Allerton Project.

The broader issue of how these various factors influence breeding abundance of a range of songbird species is discussed in much more detail in my book.

Trees, floods and climate change

I recently returned from the biennial EURAF European Agroforestry Conference in the Czech Republic. My train from Vienna was cancelled because of exceptionally severe flooding in Austria and southern Germany so that I arrived home a day late. It was a relatively minor inconvenience. The flooding resulted in fatalities, river levels rising to their highest level in a century, and the Danube being closed to shipping.

Flood risk management is one of the research areas for the Allerton Project and its research partners in our Water Friendly Farming Project. Our research shows that simple permeable timber dams in the 1,000-hectare headwater of the Eye Brook can reduce peak flow by 15% in one in two-year storm events. For more intense storm events, the benefits are much reduced, and in the storms of the recent winter which were estimated to be equivalent to around one in forty or fifty-year events, some of the dams were damaged. Given that such intense storms are becoming more frequent, this highlights the limit to which we can protect ourselves from the impacts of climate change.

Managing the wider landscape by improving soil management to increase the rate at which water permeates the ground, reducing surface runoff, is an additional approach to managing flood risk. If managed appropriately, grassland has an important role here. Our research shows that even a simple beetle bank of coarse grasses planted across a slope can increase water infiltration rates by up to nine times. But when the soil is completely saturated, infiltration and runoff cannot be controlled. That was the case through most of the recent winter. Again, there is a limit to which we can take measures to protect ourselves from the impacts of climate change. The priority must be to address climate change itself.

At the recent agroforestry conference, I presented the results of our research into reducing greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant livestock. Initial results suggest that feeding willow leaves to weaned lambs halves nitrous oxide emissions from their urine. In the scale of things, that may be a modest contribution to addressing climate change, but given that the global warming potential of nitrous oxide is nearly three hundred times that of carbon dioxide, using willow as supplementary fodder appears to have a part to play.

Such integration of trees into farming systems, complementing rather than competing with food production, is very different from large scale afforestation of farmland. That is something that is increasingly carried out in the name of climate change mitigation, but in reality, results in long-term loss of productive land, often to justify the continued use of fossil fuels.

One shocking realisation of my attendance at the conference was that many delegates had flown in from other countries when they could have taken a train, reducing their climate impact. However positive our public environmental credibility may be, the science is clear that we are part of the problem rather than the solution if we continue to promote fossil fuel use by flying or holding pension funds and other investments in fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, in the flooded areas of Austria and Germany, the results of the European election reveal a swing to the right, largely influenced by popular concerns about immigration, a process that is increasingly influenced by climate change impacts elsewhere in the world. The tragic irony is that the change in governance may result in a relaxation of political determination to address climate change.

Now that the predicted implications of the UK’s departure from the EU have become reality, one possible positive consequence may be that our new government from July can take a lead in implementing measures that address both climate change adaptation and mitigation. Allerton Project research can contribute to that process.