Bigger thinking needed to make farming more sustainable

A larger-scale approach to sustainable farming could be more beneficial for wildlife than our current system of farm-based payments, according to University of Leeds researchers. As the global population grows, demands on land become ever greater and environmental change is likely to add to the pressure. The team, working within the UK research councils’ Rural Economy and Land Use programme, has been investigating the most effective approaches to optimising sustainable food production while protecting wildlife. They conclude that conservation of populations of animals and plants requires thinking and planning across the landscape, because it is at this scale, not the farm scale, that many ecological processes happen. A key advance in thinking is not how to make each farm more wildlife friendly in itself, but how to make the landscape as a whole better for producing both food and wildlife. Farming systems that avoid using chemicals to increase yields are often thought to be the best options from a conservation point of view, but this research has shown that a mixture of high-yield, intensive farming and land managed for nature can, in some instances, produce both more food and more wildlife than the pursuit of wildlife-friendly farming across the whole landscape. The team argues for more coherent planning of our whole approach to intensive and non-intensive production.