The Allerton Project research book is published today!

‘Farming with the Environment: Thirty Years of Allerton Project Research’ is published today.

The book is a detailed but accessible account of the wide range of agri-environmental research that we have carried out since the project started in 1992. Topics covered include farmland ecology, the design of new management practices to enhance farmland wildlife, soil management and health, catchment management, and water quality and ecology and much more. One chapter explores land management issues from the farmer and farm business perspective. Another draws on our research work to emphasise the need to understand and accept the complexity of many of the issues in order to make meaningful changes that will meet both farming and environmental objectives. The practical and policy implications of our research form a strong theme for the book.

We have achieved much in the 30 years of the Allerton Project's research activities. In recent years, songbird breeding numbers have consistently been around 90% higher than in the 1992 baseline. In the intervening years, numbers have fluctuated in response to our changes in management, providing valuable information on how different species are affected by different management practices. We have made a major contribution to the suite of habitat management options available to farmers through agri-environment schemes, particularly wild bird seed crops, supplementary feeding, grass margins and beetle banks. Our research has taught us much about how best to manage soils to achieve multiple benefits, and about the management of water at the catchment scale.

The research described in the book has been carried out by our own research staff on the farm at Loddington, by other GWCT researchers, by several PhD students, and numerous research partners from other organisations. While all these people are too numerous to mention individually in the book, beyond citation of their respective contributions, our current small research team at Loddington is represented by John Szczur, Jenny Bussell Gemma Fox and myself.

John Szczur is our Ecologist and has been with the Allerton Project since it started in 1992. He has an exceptional knowledge of plant, vertebrate and invertebrate identification and ecology and carries out a lot of the wildlife survey work at and around Loddington, as well as much of the sample and data collection for our Water Friendly Farming project. Dr Jenny Bussell is our Soil Scientist and has considerable experience of soil function and greenhouse gas flux in a wide range of natural and agricultural systems across the UK and abroad. She joined us in 2019. Gemma Fox has been our Research Assistant since 2017 and has previous experience as an Animal Health Inspector as well as considerable personal experience of beef and sheep farming. She collects much of the data associated with our soil and livestock research.

Our combined expertise forms a core around which we have assembled a considerable network of research partners to enable us to carry out wide-ranging interdisciplinary research. The publication of our book enables us to make this work accessible to a wide audience to inform management practice on-farm, and national land use policy.