The Long View

This is the first of a sequence of blog posts based on chapters from my latest book, ‘Farming with the Environment: Thirty Years of Allerton Project Research’ which was recently published by Routledge. Logically enough, I am starting at the beginning, not the beginning of the Allerton Project, but the earliest evidence we have for agricultural activity on the farm at Loddington in Leicestershire.

Archaeological fieldwalking has revealed the presence of Neolithic flint scatters, Iron Age iron smelting, Roman farmsteads, and a small Anglo-Saxon settlement. The size of the village at Loddington grew during the Medieval period, only to contract again as a result of plague. Then the Medieval open field farming system gave way to enclosed fields for grazing livestock, with only limited arable production until the Second World War threatened national food security.

The subsequent period has seen a radical change in food production, and in wider society. The science-led Green Revolution was associated with a move towards high external input agricultural systems, simplification of crop rotations, and an increase in scale. The negative impacts of this on the environment, and an increasing realisation that agricultural and environmental objectives are integrated, inspired a move towards agri-environmental research. It is worth considering how past farmers would regard our current farming methods and how future generations will judge their sustainability. The GWCT’s pioneering ecological studies, and the wide-ranging research at Loddington have been at the heart of efforts to ensure that agricultural and environmental objectives are met simultaneously.

Members of the local farming community who remember the farming systems of the 1930s have contributed verbatim to the book. They bring to life the practices adopted at the time. Understanding the evolution of farming systems through history provides an enlightening context against which to consider how food might be produced in future. Such historical knowledge also strengthens local identity, establishing ownership of current agri-environmental problems and opportunities for change.

Knowledge of how wildlife has responded to historical changes in land use is much more sketchy than the knowledge of land use changes themselves. Systematic records of wildlife have been kept only in recent decades, supplemented by more casual observations from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Together, these provide an insight into the changing fortunes of a range of species in response to both land use change and other factors.

Pollen records provide evidence of longer-term ecological change, and we have also used our understanding of current ecological processes to make a tentative estimation of previous aquatic invertebrate and wild bee communities for example.

But for most of us, the wildlife we experienced in our childhood provides a subconscious benchmark against which to assess the current status of wildlife species, and more worryingly, our aspirations for future change. Understanding longer-term historical changes in land use and species abundance provides essential context for developing plans for increasing wildlife, alongside the maintenance of food production, but a scientific understanding of how these are integrated is vital. That is the subject of subsequent chapters in the book.