Wildlife and our food

As a society, we have become disconnected, not just from the sources of our food, but from the very concept that the process of food production is integrated with countless wildlife species. In Chapter 3 of Farming with the Environment, I describe the results of our research into the role of life in soil that is used to grow food. Chapter 4 extends this to above ground wildlife – pollinating insects, crop pest predators, and other species that have evolved over millennia to share the farmed environment with us.

Thirty years of wildlife monitoring provide exceptional data for the Allerton Project’s farm at Loddington. We have also carried out research into habitat use by a wide range of species, including grass, hedge and woodland field boundary habitat use by crop pest predators such as spiders, and ground and rove beetles.

Our work on pollinating insects has revealed how their abundance today is limiting fruit-set in hedgerow shrubs such as blackthorn and hawthorn, and landscape scale surveys provide an insight into the enormous range in abundance of wild bees across a range of sites. We have used spatial models to estimate how wild bee numbers might have changed historically, but more importantly, how their numbers could be restored through future land use change.

Six species of grasshoppers and crickets have colonised the farm, largely in response to climate change, during the first fifteen years of the project. Despite national declines in abundance of moths, our long-term monitoring shows that moth numbers have increased by more than a third at Loddington over the thirty years, with the number of species present also increasing by around 20%. Overall songbird numbers doubled within the first six years of the project and much of our research over the years has been on how songbirds use the land we are managing to produce food.

For example, song thrush nests that successfully produce young have a higher proportion of pasture grazed by sheep within their foraging range than failed nests which have more arable land. Yellowhammers change from one crop to another through the nesting season when gathering food for their young, so crop diversity within the foraging range is likely to increase survival. We also have detailed information of the diet of many birds that forage for invertebrates on productive land during the breeding season.

Our research has shown that the land that we are managing to produce food is not just supporting wildlife, but that in some cases those species are increasing in abundance, many are beneficial to food production, while others are iconic species that we appreciate in their own right. Developing methods of further improving the farmed environment to benefit this full range of species is the subject of another chapter.