The case for broader buffering benefits

Grass margins around fields are readily adopted by farmers within agri-environment schemes but are sometimes criticised for failing to deliver on the environmental objectives for which they are intended.  But such criticism often arises because too narrow a focus is taken on the benefits.  These include the ability to cut hedges later in the winter, after berries have been eaten by birds, and the provision of a habitat for pollinating insects and invertebrate crop pest predators. 

Our research into both field margins and the productive area can guide the development of integrated land management

The greatest potential is where grass margins are placed against watercourses, including ditches and small streams, as well as rivers.  Used in this way, their capacity to reduce movement of soil to adjacent watercourses is well established.  We have found that earthworm numbers are more than twice as high in grass margins as in the adjacent field, helping to improve infiltration and reduce surface runoff to water and acting as a refuge for recolonisation of cultivated land, as well as providing a food source for wildlife.

What plant species establish as a result of sowing or natural regeneration also influences the benefits realised by grass margins, as does their subsequent management.  We are exploring the traits and associated benefits arising from a range of perennial herbaceous plant species, with the aim of delivering multiple benefits.  The establishment and management of riparian woodland, where appropriate, is an extension of that process.

Buffer strips can be further enhanced by creating buffer pools within them to capture runoff, as we have been doing at Loddington since the 1990s, although the efficacy of these is limited on clay soils where very fine material is held in suspension.  Additional barriers within field boundary ditches serve a similar role. We have shown that, although eutrophic, pools fed by runoff can have additional biodiversity benefits for birds, amphibians and insects.  Where more permeable dams are installed in field boundary ditches or small streams, these have the potential to buffer downstream areas from flood peaks and we are currently evaluating these in our Water Friendly Farming project. Stacking multiple buffering measures requires additional knowledge, investment and management but increases the value of public benefits delivered from the same area of land.

But we know that each of these measures in non-productive areas has only a limited role in reducing the movement of sediment and nutrients to watercourses and additional measures need to be adopted within fields to improve soil function, reduce soil erosion, and deliver other benefits such as enhanced terrestrial biodiversity.  Research at Loddington has identified the potential of tramline management and reduced tillage intensity for example, and as reported in my March post, we have also explored the potential role of cover crops, and are currently investigating grass leys. An integrated approach to land management needs to be taken to meet environmental objectives, incorporating targeted evidence-based management of both productive and non-productive areas.

How effective these measures are varies considerably from time to time and place to place, a subject I will return to in a future post, but each of them has a place for their cumulative impact.  With new funding mechanisms for agri-environment schemes currently under consideration in the lead up to Brexit, there is considerable potential for a number of options to enhance the standard grass margins that are now widely adopted across the country.  One solution might be a modular approach to buffer strips with bolt-on options, but crucially, each adopted according to site specific, local circumstances.

It is vital to recognise that we can’t rely on buffers outside the cropped area alone, however elaborate they might become in some situations.  Soil management within the field, reducing erosion in the first place, is fundamental to catchment management and to meeting other environmental objectives, with a range of options for differing soil types.  But these require attention to detail, timely operation, capital investment, technical advice and support, and in some circumstances reduce crop yields.

There are still unknowns and a need for continuing research, and we continue to play a major role in that at Loddington, but we know enough about a range of field margin and in-field measures to adopt a package for improved land management that delivers food production alongside other public benefits.

Getting together around soil

If we felt we had got to know our local farming community fairly well over the past 25 years of the Allerton Project's existence, that process has stepped up a gear in the last couple of years through our shared interest in soil.  Today, a dozen farmers met at Loddington as part of our Soil Biology and Soil Health project with AHDB, led by Elizabeth Stockdale at NIAB.  'Health' assumes life, and this project explores the relationship between life in soils and farm production.  Several other farmers expressed regret at being unable to attend because cold, waterlogged, lifelss soils associated with the recent rains had delayed many arable operations and added considerably to the current workload for both arable and livestock farmers.

Our research brings together local farmers through EU, Defra and AHDB funded soil research projects at Loddington

As part of the Soil Biology and Soil Health project, we are investigating the impact of ploughing experimental plots through a long-term no-till field at Loddington and documenting the changes in crop performance and soil properties (of which more another time).  We also want local farmers to take soil samples on their own farms to contribute to our collective understanding of the relationship between soil management practices and agricultural activities and production, through their influence on the biological activity of soil.

More to come in due course - the soilquality.org.uk home page

A related initiative provides an opportunity for local farmers to collect soil samples for analysis and compare their results with those from other local farms, similar soil types, or comparable farming systems locally, or elsewhere in the country.  This project is at an early stage, with the first soil samples only just being taken, but results will be uploaded in due course to the interactive website at www.soilquality.org.uk where participating farmers will be able to compare their soil properties with those on other farms and consider the implications for their businesses.

In our EU funded project, SoilCare, local farmers have played a key role, through a carefully structured process, prioritising what research we should carry out.  As a result, we are now comparing a range of modern deep-rooting agricultural ley grasses, gathering data on forage yield and quality, and on changes in soil properties, including infiltration rates.  We are also experimenting with different ways of alleviating soil compaction and gathering data on crop performance and soil biology, as well as on changes to the physical properties of the soil itself.  Those farmers who were able to get to Loddington today were able to view these experimental plots and discuss the visible differences in crop performance.  Our research on cover crops as part of Defra's Sustainable Intensification research Platform (SIP), also provided an opportunity for local farmers to view and discuss experimental plots at Loddington (see last month's blog post).

While there is considerable interest from the farming community from the perspective of agricultural production and profitability (in an economic climate which makes this objective increasingly challenging), each of these research projects also has considerable relevance to catchment management. Foremost in many of our minds during the recent period of prolonged heavy rain is the potential for reducing flood risk.

Cover crops research

The potential of cover crops to reduce impacts on water are fairly well understood, but the agricultural benefits are less clear, especially on the clay soils that are found across much of Lowland England.  Over the past two years this issue has been investigated by our Soil Scientist, Dr Felicity Crotty as part of our contribution to Defra's SIP (see my December blog post).

Sprayed off cover crops at Loddington, March 2018

In 2015/16, we tested three different cover crop mixtures against a control (no cover crop present), replicated across three fields.  In 2016/17, we tested the individual component species in those mixtures, with three replicates in the same field.  The first experiment adopted various mixtures of cereal, phacelia, radish and legumes, while the second experiment tested oats, phacelia, vetch, buckwheat and radish individually.  In each case, we monitored a range of soil chemical, physical and biological properties, as well as cover crop and weed cover, and the yield and weed cover in the following spring-sown oats crop.

Cover crop mixtures containing radish generally supported 4 times higher numbers of surface dwelling (epigeic) earthworms. Control plots had up to twenty-three times as much weed cover as cover crop plots.  In the following spring-sown oats, the yield, although low, was 60% higher in plots which had contained these cover crop mixtures, and the amount of black-grass and other weeds was up to six times higher in the control plots than the plots which had contained cover crops.

In the single species cover crop experiment, by February, epigeic earthworm biomass was 3.5 times higher in the radish plots than in the control.  Weed cover was over 5 times higher in the bare stubble control plots than in oats and radish plots which had good cover of the planted cover crops.  This provides a clear indication of the ability of some cover crops to supress weeds.  The yield of spring oats was 20% higher in plots which had previously contained radish compared to the bare stubble control plots, but overall yields were again low and the difference was not statistically significant.

The low weed burden in the spring-sown oats is likely to be due to improved rooting conditions for the cash crop and associated crop vigour and competitive advantage, rather than to supression of weeds in the cover crop. In fact, while a sparse, open-structured crop may have lower benefits to the soil in terms of organic matter contribution for example, higher germination of weeds in the cover crop provides more opportunity for weed control when the cover crop is sprayed off in late winter.  Such are the trade-offs associated with cover crops.

On clay soils in the Midlands, establishment of cover crops occurs later than on lighter soils and more southern locations, resulting in a less dense crop than can be achieved in more favourable conditions.  Cover crops also do not reach the stage of maturity that occurs elsewhere with the result that physical means of cover crop destruction such as crimping are not feasible and a glyphosate application is necessary, even if the cover crops are previously grazed by sheep.

While the costs of cover crops remain constant from year to year, the benefits are likely to vary with weather, harvest and soil conditions.  While weed control and water protection benefits are realised in the first year, cover crops that improve soil properties may have longer lasting implications for crop performance and water quality.  These are issues which are of considerable relevance to the economics of adopting cover crops and their role in environmental improvement.  New research being carried out at Loddington over the next few years will contribute further to this debate.

Sustainable Intensification - the foundation is laid

The Allerton Project has played a major role in Defra's Sustainable Intensification research Platform (SIP) over the past three years as one of the five research and demonstration farms in the SIP network. The wider SIP consortium has involved around thirty partners, and last week, most of us attended a three day conference to present our results, share lessons learnt, and discuss options for the future.  The aim of the SIP was always to establish a network of farms and associated research partners as a foundation for continuing collaboration on research into management practices which address economic, environmental and social objectives in agriculture.  The need for such a network is greater now than it has ever been.

Nigel Kendall (Nottingham Uni.) shares research results with visiting farmers

For us at Loddington, the SIP enabled us to carry out our first research into grass and livestock systems.  As a result of the research carried out by Nottingham University School of Veterinary Science, we now have a better understanding of how availability of trace elements such as selenium and cobalt vary spatially between fields and seasonally through the spring and summer, and how sheep respond to these changes.  Such an understanding is important to our ability to integrate livestock and arable systems, bringing grass leys into the rotation so that they perform optimally for both arable and livestock interests, while also delivering for the environment through reduced flood risk, improved soil structure and water quality, and benefits to biodiversity. A summary of this work is available here.  The collaboration with Nottingham University is one we are continuing, with further work already being undertaken on grass and livestock systems. 

The SIP has also enabled us to carry out research into the potential economic and envirommental benefits of cover crops, and into issues associated with landuse change at the catchment scale.  Cover crops are increasingly adopted on lighter soils and in southern England where they are valued by farmers for the benefits they bring to soil structure, organic matter and nutrient cycling, and subsequently to the following cash crop.  On clay soils further north though, the benefits are less clear.  Growing conditions mean that harvests are later and soil conditions are cooler and often wetter when cover crops are drilled, resulting in poorer establishment and associated benefits.  We were able to explore these issues and I will report on this another time, but you can download a summary here.

Our catchment scale work within the SIP was built into our existing Water Friendly Farming experiment and involved using the grass weed herbicide propyzamide as a focus for discussing with farmers a wider range of ecosystem services associated with landscape scale soil and water management.  Both the plot scale cover crops research and landscape scale work on propyzamide are centred around soil as the key natural capital asset for any farm business.

Throughout, we are aiming to develop management practices which benefit both the farm business and the environment, optimising the use of natural resources to achieve this.  Terms such as 'sustainable intensification', 'ecosystem services' and 'natural capital' are commonly used in discussing this broad issue, but each represents a form of jargon that sits uncomfortably with many people.  This is especially so when these terms are promoted with doctrinal zeal which can be confusing and offputting.  It is almost as though such language is used to distance the speaker from the listener - more to instill authority than understanding.

But these terms do have an important role in furthering our understanding, not least through the limitations that each of them has.  As an apparent oxymoron, 'sustainable intensification' does this well, highlighting the tension between maximising production now and ensuring production is maintained into the future through a healthy environment, and pointing the way towards an approach in which both can be optimised.  'Ecosystem services' emphasises the need to improve our understanding of the environmental trade-offs underlying, not just production but multiple other benefits to society, but also reveals the need to recognise those aspects of our environment from which there is no obvious or immediate benefit to society. While 'natural capital' highlights the need to value this broad range of natural resources, it also highlights the limitations associated with making that value purely economic, revealing our lack of knowledge to make that possible, even when it might be desirable.

Such considerations can guide future research to fill these knowledge gaps, but we need to leave the jargon behind when it comes to translating those research findings into guidance for practical management.  Knowledge exchange has been a central part of the SIP, as it has for the Allerton Project throughout the past quarter century.  It is that interaction between academics, the research and demonstration farm network, and a wide range of agricultural professionals which has given the SIP its strength.  The foundation is laid.  There is now some building to do.

Multiple resources and a common vision

The Welland Valley Partnership was one of the first to be set up under Defra's Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) initiative in 2013.  The partnership is led by the Welland Rivers Trust with support from the Environment Agency, and also includes local authorities, National Farmers Union, Anglian Water and others, including ourselves.  The partnership's Resource Protection Group (RPG) includes these and other interests and aims to identify common ground between the often disperate interests of the partners and to guide and support local farmers to adopt management practices that improve the river.

But the Resource Protection Group is not concerned only with water as a resource. Soil, nutrients, and even pesticides which cause problems in water are also resources that require stewardship and wise use in order to achieve profitable farm businesses, as well as improved water quality and enhanced aquatic biodiversity.  The common ground is not hard to find.  Achieving common objectives is more challenging.

That is where the other resource comes into play - knowledge.  That includes the scientific knowledge that the Allerton Project accumulates by conducting research at field, farm and landscape scales, but it also includes the knowledge that farmers have about their land at a similar range of scales. 

Within the Welland RPG there is a balance between practical and academic expertise, spread across the spheres of water policy, catchment ecology, drinking water supply, agri-environmental advice delivery, soil science, agronomy, agricultural policy and practical farming. We have not fallen out yet!  That is not to say that we duck the difficult issues where conflicting interests create challenges, but there is a genuine desire to concentrate on the benefits to us all by focusing on the synergies between land and water management that will meet the needs of our children in future, as well as ourselves right now.

We don't have all the answers, and not everything we do goes as we might expect it to, but that is the nature of a pioneering initiative.  By working closely with the local farming community, and drawing on the latest results from our research, and all the expertise within the group, we are well placed to achieve those common objectives.  And through the Allerton Project's ongoing programme of knowledge exchange activities, we can share the lessons learnt, the good and the bad, with land and water managers from across the country so that the benefits of our work reach far beyond the river Welland.

The nature of landscapes

The wildlife present in any given landscape is determined by the characteristics of that landscape, but what are the characteristics that are most influential, especially for farmland species where the conflict between profitable food production and wildife conservation has played out most forcefully over the past half century or so?  These influences could be types of crops or the amount of semi-natural habitats, or the diversity of different crops and semi-natural habitats, or the complexity of the spatial arrangement of those crops and semi-natural habitats across the landscape.   Inevitably, different species are dependent on cropped or semi-natural habitats to differing extents, but the diversity or spatial arrangement may play an additional role.

Landscape diversity (left) and complexity (right)

We know that some bird species are associated with woodland, others with open fields, and still more use a combination of open fields and woodland or hedges.  Our monitoring at Loddington also tells us that different bird species are associated with different crops, with linnets and reed buntings using oilseed rape, and tree sparrows using field beans for example.  How crops are managed is another influence.  Low input crops support a greater abundance of invertebrate food for breeding birds than intensively managed crops for example. Twenty years ago, our research at Loddington showed that yellowhammers gathering food for their young used different crops at different times during the breeding season.  They had a foraging range of up to 300 metres, so both crop diversity and spatial arrangement of habitats would influence their access to suitable foraging sites.  
 

Fallow land with Holm Oaks in the study area

In a recently published paper, we explored the influences of landscape characteristics on bird communities in an agricultural area of southern Portugal.  Modelling used bird survey data from 1995-1997, and a subsequent period (2010-2012) in which changes to landscape characteristics had occurred as a result of Common Agricultural Policy reform.  For both farmland species, and rarer species that are characteristic of open steppe conditions, the heterogeneity of natural habitats had some positive influence, and for farmland species, the amount of edge had a positive effect.  However, for the steppe birds, the greatest positive influence was the area of rain-fed arable crops and pasture.

These results suggest that, while structural characteristics of the landscape have an influence on breeding bird communities, the land that is used for food production can have a greater influence for some species if managed sympathetically.   Southern Portugal is not the same as the UK, but this paper supports the suggestion that we need to consider both the composition of the landscape - the crops we grow and the way we grow them - as well as landscape heterogeneity to meet the needs of farmland wildlife. 

This is an approach that we are taking at Loddington, where we have increased habitat diversity and complexity by introducing new habitats through our Environmental Stewardship agreement, but have also increased the diversity of cropped land by extending the arable rotation to include more crops.  To some extent this change is driven by the need to manage competetive grass weeds, but this approach makes the practical management of the rotation more complicated, demands a greater knowledge base, and requires greater storage capacity for the different harvested crops for example. In the past, we have increased the complexity of the spatial crop distribution across the farm, as well as the diversity, but this proved to be a step too far in terms of the economic cost to the business.

We also modify the management of our crops, not least by the selective use of pesticides to minimise negative ecological impacts on pollinating insects, invertebrate predators of crop pests, and the invertebrates that provide food for farmland birds.  Such an approach also requires commitment and knowledge and complicates farm management decisions in what is already an economically challenging world.  The global market for crops pays little heed to the requirements of wildlife, or farmers wishing to conserve it.  Similarly, our move, over a number of years, towards a no-till system of crop establishment, stabilises soil conditions, contributing to better soil function, with potential benefits to terrestrial and aquatic wildlife, but it is not without its challenges and economic costs along the way.

Modifying crop management, increasing crop diversity, and increasing landscape complexity are all changes that are likely to benefit wildlife and landscape in the UK as much as in southern Portugal, but the farming systems and approaches to achieve this are very different.  That is something to consider between now and March 2019.

The first 25 years of the Allerton Project

This month we celebrate our first quarter century of research and educational activities at Loddington.  Over the twenty-five years, the Allerton Project has become a byword for practical evidence-based information on a wide range of agri-environmental issues and it is a real privilege to have played an active part in the project for the whole of that time.  On the night of 24 February 1992, our first data were collected from the farm when I ventured north from Dorset to count hares at Loddington.  We still monitor hare numbers on the farm, as well as gamebirds and songbirds, using the same methods that we used twenty-five years ago, creating a consistent and valuable long-term dataset.

Examples of how our research results have fed into policy and practice are numerous. In the early years we helped to inform guidance on set-aside management to improve skylark nesting success and carried out research on grass margins which contributed to the development of one of the most widely adopted agri-environment scheme options. A MAFF contract in the late 1990s enabled us to develop wild bird seed mixtures as an agri-environment scheme option.  Later, we were able to use our long-term monitoring of bird numbers at Loddington to support the case for the provision of seed food in winter to improve the late winter survival and breeding numbers of farmland birds.

Intensive monitoring of the nesting success of songbirds has contributed enormously to our improved understanding of the interaction of habitat and predation pressure on songbird nesting success and subsequent breeding abundance.  As a result of the management system implemented at Loddington, songbird numbers are twice as high now as they were at the start of the project.

Our research extends beyond our own farm at Loddington, especially in terms of catchment management.  A decade ago, we highlighted the impact of rural septic tanks on water quality and aquatic life, and more recently have done the same for rural sewage treatment works through our Water Friendly Farming project.  A partnership with the Freshwater Habitats Trust, this project has become a national focal point for issues relating to the management of agricultral catchments, including nutrients, pesticides and sediment in water, and the implications of land management for downstream flood risk. The combination of field and plot-scale research at Loddington and landscape scale research in Water Friendly Farming enabled us to become one of just three research and demonstration farms linked to landscape scale projects in Defra's Sustainable Intensification research Platform (SIP).

SIP study site leads outside the Allerton Project eco-build visitor centre which receives several thousand visitors each year

Highly relevant to our objectives for improved water quality, managing flood risk, and reducing our contribution to climate change, as well as for economically viable food production, is our research on soil management during a period in which the farm has moved from a plough-based system to direct drilling.  Defra and EU funding has enabled us to explore the potential of cover crops, reduced tillage, in-field barriers and field edge detention ponds.  As a result, we now have a rapidly developing understanding of soil compaction, organic matter, and the important role that below-ground life plays in maintaining soil function to meet both economic and environmental objectives.  While our focus has mainly been on arable cropping, we have recently introduced research on livestock systems and agroforestry.

Our Ecologist, John Szczur has contributed to the Allerton Project's research for the full twenty-five years, but over that time we have also worked with numerous research partners.  Indeed, one of the strengths of the Allerton Project must be our long record of collaborating on research with a wide range of partners across Europe, from academia, NGOs and industry, and our active involvement of the local farming community.  We have also benefited from the many MSc and PhD students who have worked with us over the years.

We have a wealth of knowledge to share.  Last year nearly four thousand people came through our eco-build visitor centre to learn about our research results, how they might be applied on farm, and to the development and implementation of agri-environmental policies.  Our role in this is more important now than ever, as we prepare for life outside the EU.

We have recently updated our report on the Allerton Project's activities, 'Fields for the Future' and you can download a pdf here.  Also, look out for my article in the August issue of British Wildlife, and for further updates on individual projects on this blog over the coming months. 

Welland Arable Business Group

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) runs a network of Arable Business Groups across the country, enabling farmers from the same area to benchmark the economic performance of their cropping against each other, and against regional and national averages.  It's a great initiative that stimulates discussion within the group about how we each approach our cropping systems.  It is an opportunity for us to learn from each other, as well as from AHDB expertise, and from invited speakers. 

The Welland Arable Business Group was formed in 2015.  Its members have a wide range of business types including various forms of tenure, a range of farm sizes, and some representation of livestock in the predominently arable systems. 

Economic benchmarking stimulates discussion about the dependence of our businesses on the environment

Low crop prices and increasing input costs, coupled with the impending but unkown changes associated with Brexit, mean that profitability is elusive and the future, uncertain. Add to that the vagaries of the weather and exchange rates and maintaining a viable business becomes even more challenging.  This certainly focuses the mind on reducing input costs and making the most of existing assets, but at the same time, makes investment in new equipment and strategies difficult.

Soil is the most fundamental resource of most farm businesses and one of the messages to come out of our discussions within the group is that we need to improve our management of it.  The drive for ever larger machinery, combined with more frequent intense winter rains, and a decline in soil organic matter, all contribute to deteriorating soil conditions and reduce our capacity for both economic and environmental sustainability.

Soil Organic Matter (%) on farms in the upper Welland river basin

Loss of soil organic matter is something that group members have identified as being of concern, and we have been able to help by carrying out surveys of organic matter across farms in the upper Welland.  This provides a baseline against which individual farms can evaluate any changes they make in their soil management.  Most are currently well below the 5% considered to be desirable for effective soil function in terms of crop rooting capacity, nutrient uptake and summer moisture retention.

Our new EU funded SoilCare research project provides an opportunity for us to explore, with local farmers, new approaches to soil management that could help to improve farm profitability, while also delivering public benefits such as improved water quality, and reduced flood risk, all work that links neatly with our other ongoing research projects.

Members taking part in the prioritisation process for soil management research

Group members are not passive recipients of the research results, but have an active role from the start.  In fact, it is the farmers who are setting the research agenda by identifying and prioritising the areas of greatest relevance and interest to their businesses.  Farmers will continue to be actively engaged in the research as it develops.  This approach ensures that the research we carry out as the UK site in this European project will also be relevant to other farmers across much of lowland England. 

A flood of interest

Following hard on the heels of the previous record-breaking year, the close of 2016 marks the end of another warmest-year-on-record.  A warming climate is associated with greater frequency of intense storm events and flooding in the UK.  Climate change research back in the 1980s highlighted this association, and warned of rising sea levels and increasing frequency of flood events across much of the world. 

Thirty years ago, the UN's 1987 Brundtland Report brought the results of that research more fully into the public domain.  It highlighted the need for mitigation to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and for adaptation to inevitable short-term change. Following two decades of limited activity, the UK's Stern Report back in 2006 provided evidence that the benefits to the UK of strong, early action would considerably outweigh the costs involved.  The earlier effective action is taken, the less costly it will be.

Sediment-laden flood water in a central section of the Eye Brook tributary of the river Welland in 2016

Flooding across the UK since then is consistent with climate change researchers' projections, and the UK Committee on Climate Change identifies flooding as currently the greatest risk associated with climate change. Insurance companies are taking the issue seriously as some properties become uninsurable and the risk associated with others becomes uncertain.  'Building resilience' is an increasing refrain from insurers, while the Bank of England expresses concern about financial instability associated with climate change.

Within our Water Friendly Farming project, we are investigating options for adapting to current flood risk trends by introducing permeable dams and supporting farmers in their efforts to improve soil management to attenuate flood peaks.  As well as potentially reducing flood risk downstream, better soil management can also reduce the effects on crop performance of water-logging, compaction and grass weed competition associated with a combination of heavy machinery and intense rainfall. 

Our continuing monitoring of flow at the base of each of the three study catchments will enable us to document actual change in due course.  We will be modeling the implications of our management on downstream water quality, sedimentation and flood risk under a range of rainfall scenarios.  Initial modeling results suggest that the management we are adopting may be better able to reduce the impacts of regular storm events than some of the more extreme ones that we are starting to experience more frequently than in the past.

The danger is that, as we focus on our response to immediate problems, we continue to neglect the increasingly urgent need for mitigation of longer term climate change.  In 2016, the UK government announced new targets for carbon emissions reduction by 2030 and became the 111th country to ratify the Paris Climate Agreement, signalling new national policy for climate change mitigation. This is one to watch as we enter 2017.

Within the Allerton Project, we contribute towards mitigation by adopting renewable energy and effective insulation, home-working and teleconferences, minimising flying and supporting local food producers.  But we need to do much more, as a society and as individuals, to mitigate climate change rather than just adapting to the consequences of it.  Recent American research suggests that the next thirty years may not be as kind to us as the previous thirty have been.  Our New Year's resolutions seem obvious enough.

Robin reliance

It's the time of year when we bring bits of tree into the house and send each other pictures of robins. Robins have featured on Christmas cards since Victorian times and have become as integrated into our mid-winter festivities as holly and mistletoe.  Even the technological advances of recent decades have not totally eclipsed our long evolutionary psychological integration with nature.

Robins are one of our most widespread and abundant species, occuring in woodland, on farms, and in urban gardens.  As a confiding and adaptable bird, the robin is a species which is much loved by a large proportion of people.  This is a species which has a strong cultural value.

Robin territory numbers at Loddington

Robins have fared well at Loddington.  Breeding numbers doubled between 1992 and 2001 during which time we carried out a combination of habitat improvement, legal predator control and winter feeding.  Numbers were 24% lower in 2006 in the absence of predator control.  In this, robins follow the trend set by species such as blackbird and spotted flycatcher whose nesting success and breeding numbers are influenced by the control of nest predators.  

Robin numbers were 56% lower in 2010 in the absence of winter feeding as well as predator control.  Robins are regular visitors to garden bird tables, and have also frequently been recorded using gamebird feed hoppers on the farm at Loddington.  Our Trailcam records even document robins feeding from hoppers at night.  Those big eyes which are no doubt part of the robin's popular appeal, are put to good use.  With predator control and winter feeding restored at Loddington in recent years, robin numbers are now at their highest level since 1992.

This sort of conservation management system has a cost, and this is met by a combination of private funding and government payments through initiatives such as the Countryside Stewardship scheme.  At times of political and economic uncertainty, searching questions are inevitably asked about expenditure at all levels, from government to individual farms and households.  The moral imperative for wildlife conservation aside, the case for public and private investment in wildlife is strong.

Each Christmas we demonstrate the cultural value we attach to robins, but the importance of this species, and countless others, extends much further.  The evidence for important benefits of wildife to human psychological wellbeing continues to mount.  Wildlife can reduce stress and anxiety, and increase positive mood, self-esteem and resilience, helping to reduce mental health problems which are an enormous and persistent social and economic national burden.  The robin is a seasonal reminder that, at times of political and economic uncertainty, arguably above all others, our wildlife is an asset which we need to recognise and support for our mutual benefit.

Water Friendly Farming project results

We launched our latest report on the Water Friendly Farming project at Westminster earlier in the week.  You can access a copy here.

The report covers the results of intensive data collection across five years, and three headwater catchments totalling around 3,000 hectares.  We weren’t surprised by the large turnout to the launch.  This is a project with exceptional experimental rigour, practical grounding and multiple objectives that are highly relevant to current policy for water management in agricultural catchments. The most notable results are worth summarising here.

Phosphorus concentrations at the base of the two ‘treatment’ catchments and one control catchment have increased during the five-year period.  Although high phosphorus concentrations are often associated with high sediment concentrations during peak winter stream flow, for most of the time, during base flow, high phosphorus concentrations are the result of discharges from sewage treatment works.  The increase may be influenced by the relatively low concentrations associated with high summer flows during 2012, but the fact remains that domestic sources of phosphorus are a major issue in rural catchments.  Both agricultural and domestic sources are difficult and slow to address but our research is improving our understanding of the issues.

Landscape scale aquatic biodiversity, as represented by aquatic and wetland plants, has increased in the two ‘treatment’ catchments in response to the creation of new wetland habitats, while remaining constant in the control catchment where there has been no such management.  This is the first unequivocal demonstration of this process and is extremely encouraging in terms of the potential for landscape scale conservation of aquatic wildlife on farmland more widely.

Modelling of our data suggests that a switch from plough-based crop establishment to a no-till approach could result in an 11% decline in peak flow and associated downstream flooding.  The same change in crop establishment strategy could also result in a 38% reduction in sediment load exported from the catchments under most rainfall conditions.  This would also help to reduce flood risk because of reduced sedimentation of drainage channels in the lower catchment.  We will be exploring to what extent such changes are feasible within the constraints currently expedrienced by farm businesses.

Our research continues. Take a look at the report for more detail, and I'll continue to post updates on this blog periodically.