Allerton Project Research Blog

Chapter 6 of Farming with the Environment covers the aquatic side of things. Some of it is about how nutrients behave in water and how aquatic invertebrate communities are affected by them. But the fact is that what goes on in water is influenced massively by the management of the land draining into it.

Nationally and globally, the abundance and species diversity of wildlife has declined over the past decades. In Farming with the Environment, I describe the steps we have taken to reverse this decline through the development of practical evidence-based habitat creation and management.

On 4th May the Allerton Project hosted our inaugural Agricultural Biochar Knowledge Exchange event, bringing together stakeholders from across the industry with an interest in this exciting and rapidly evolving field. 

The BEESPOKE project is hosting an open day at the Allerton Project to discuss the benefits of encouraging pollinators, provide advice on the countryside stewardship options available to do so, and help outline the kind of outcomes you might see as a result.

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.

Last week, applications opened for the 2024 Countryside Stewardship Mid Tier scheme, providing grants to farmers and land managers to improve the wildlife potential of their land and enhance their natural capital. The scheme supports a range of enhanced environmental outcomes from restoring wildlife habitats and creating woodlands, to managing flood risk.

The GWCT Allerton Project is a 320ha mixed arable and livestock farm based around the small village of Loddington on the Leicestershire/Rutland border (and not to be confused with Loddington in Northamptonshire).

The health of our soil literally and metaphorically underlies the ecosystem on which we all depend. Not least, it is fundamental to farming.

The Allerton Project team recently attended the Low Carbon Agriculture event at the NAEC Stoneleigh to represent the AgriCaptureCO2 project, an EU Horizon 2020 programme of which we have been a member since 2020.

This is the first of a sequence of blog posts based on chapters from Farming with the Environment: Thirty Years of Allerton Project Research. 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.