Allerton Project Research Blog

It's UK Soils Awareness Week 2022 from 10-16th October and we recently hosted a fascinating webinar on soil carbon with Professor David Powlson, who led the research on carbon cycling at Rothamsted Research. You can watch the video of the webinar here.

The production and application of non-nitrogen fertilisers adds a further 10% to our average farm’s GHG footprint. From this we can see that optimisation and reduction of the use of fertilisers holds the key to reducing the climate impact of arable production.

Joe Stanley reports on another successful Open Farm Sunday at the Allerton Project.

Once again, growers have been struggling in recent weeks with what has been for most yet another prolonged period of dry weather, broken only sporadically and in postcode lottery fashion by heavy showers winging in from the Atlantic.

The book is a detailed but accessible account of the wide range of agri-environmental research that we have carried out since the project started in 1992. Topics covered include farmland ecology, the design of new management practices to enhance farmland wildlife, soil management and health, catchment management, and water quality and ecology and much more.

Alastair Leake, GWCT Head of Policy, explains more about a project to establish a Hedgerow Carbon Code that benefits carbon storage and biodiversity.

Thirty years ago today, I drove from my then home in Hampshire to Loddington in Leicestershire to conduct a night-time spotlight count of brown hares. That was the start of thirty years of data collection on what was to become the Allerton Project research and demonstration farm.

As farmers across the country focus their attention on the Big Farmland Bird Count it’s time to reflect on how songbird numbers on our own farm have changed since the Allerton Project started thirty years ago.

The crop drill has been busy here at Loddington, with farmers across the country relieved to experience a ‘normal’ autumn drilling season for the first time since 2018 – or at least a ten day window into which frenzied work has been committed!

It is a time of change at the GWCT’s Allerton Project, as summer gives way to autumn and the focus of research shifts again for the upcoming winter of both data collection and ongoing analysis.