MEMORANDUM BY THE GAME CONSERVANCY TRUST
(BIO 23)
The Game Conservancy Trust conducts research
into game animals and the flora and fauna that share their habitats.
The research aims to improve knowledge so that these species can
be better managed and conserved. This knowledge is passed to the
public through regular publications and scientific papers. Direct
advice to land managers is given on a fee-paying basis by the
Advisory Service of our wholly-owned subsidiary organisation Game
Conservancy Limited.
The Trust employs some 20 post-doctoral scientists
and over 40 other research staff with expertise in such areas
as ornithology, entomology, biometrics, mammalogy, agronomics
and fisheries science. It undertakes its own research as well
as projects funded by contract and grant-aid from Government and
private bodies. In 1998 it spent £1.9 million on research.
INTRODUCTION—DIFFERENCES
IN APPROACH
At a recent wildlife conference the director
of IUCN (the leading international conservation organisation)
John McNeely commented that the most useful single thing western
governments could do for conservation would be to do away with
subsidised agriculture. This radical view is based on the premise
that modern intensive farming tends to exclude wildlife and, since
subsidies support high inputs of pesticides and encourage the
farming of land that would be uneconomic otherwise, cutting subsidies
would improve the lot of wildlife at a stroke.
Even though such an approach is simplistic and
ignores the social consequences, it does recognise that there
are key issues which affect whole ecosystems. Tackling these issues
could benefit a whole range of species all the way up the food
chain from caterpillar to kestrel.
Such an approach contrasts with the detailed
and hugely bureaucratic route taken by the Biodiversity Action
Plan initiative. The Game Conservancy does of course support the
BAP programme, and it is the lead partner for the grey partridge
plan, and with others is a joint lead partner for black grouse
and brown hare. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that
there are underlying consequences to the way we manage the land
and these have led to reductions in wildlife. The Biodiversity
Action Plan approach will work best where specific problems can
be identified and tackled. Black grouse and capercaillie killing
themselves by colliding with deer fences can be tackled by removing
the deer fences and culling the deer.
Arguably too the Habitat Action Plan approach
may be effective where diverse factors impinge on particular habitats
which can be separately identified and tackled. For example chalk-streams
have been affected by water abstraction, land drainage, sewage
and farm fertiliser input.
For a great many species however, the most effective
way to improve biodiversity will be to address underlying problems.
Farmland birds are a good example. MAFF has recently nominated
20 bird species to represent this group and will use them as one
of its indicators of sustainable agriculture. The BAP will do
little on its own here as the birds have diverse needs (kestrels
eat voles and partridges eat insects and seeds) and, in any case,
this would not be the point because the birds have been chosen
to represent hundreds of others. What is needed are changes to
agriculture which support biodiversity as whole.
ARABLE FARMING—THE
PROBLEM IN
A NUTSHELL
The impact of organochlorine insecticides in
the immediate post war era showed dramatically how all-pervasive
agro-chemicals can be and how they affect whole food chains. However,
less well known are the consequences of a range of other agricultural
changes. The Game Conservancy was one of the first organisations
in Britain to realise that these shifts in farming were having
widespread and knock-on effects to wildlife. In the 1960s we found
partridge numbers were being reduced because of the introduction
of herbicides. The absence of weeds in cereal crops led to a drop
in the abundance of insects and this in turn led to the starvation
of partridge chicks, which normally forage for insects in cereals
after hatching. At that time we appear to have been the only group
to really appreciate that farm crops were not just fields of wheat
or barley but were part of a cereal ecosystem that had been evolving
and spreading for some 8000 years since arable farming started
in the Fertile Crescent during the neolithic period.
It was at once evident to us that the modernisation
of agriculture during the post war period involved much more than
just the introduction of pesticides and other agrochemicals. There
were new crops, new varieties of crop which responded better to
agricultural inputs, new machinery and larger fields to accommodate
this machinery. Some of these changes had immediate and direct
effects on wildlife, for example new grass cutting methods largely
wiped out the corncrake and combine harvesters probably put paid
to harvest mice in most districts. Less noticed were the changes
in crop rotation that followed into the 1970s and early 1980s
and to some extent are still happening today. Traditional farms
(ie those that had a rotation that had evolved from the changes
brought in at the time of the agricultural revolution) typically
had a ley rotation where a short succession of cereals is grown
in a field to be followed by a number of years when the field
is left as a grass ley. The grass is either used for hay or as
a pasture for livestock. Such farms are non-specialist and have
both livestock and arable enterprises. These traditional farms
have been replaced with what is now a typical modern conventional
arable farm. In these the livestock has mostly gone and the rotation
is a succession of cereals followed by a break crop of oilseed
rape or field beans. These changes in rotation have had at least
as much impact on wildlife as the other changes above.
We do not believe that it is possible or desirable
to reverse all these changes not least because there would be
a large drop in production if we were to do that. Neither do we
support a wholesale conversion to organic farming as a panacea
for wildlife. It has yet to be shown that organic farms are better
for wildlife than the remaining traditional farms defined above.
BIODIVERSITY AND
FARMING—A 21ST
CENTURY APPROACH
Given that the clock cannot or should not be
turned back what should be the strategy for improving wildlife
and biodiversity in the countryside?
— Uncouple subsidies for farmers from
agricultural production. The shift from production payments to
area payments has been a key step in the right direction.
— Recognise that agrochemical and other
agronomic improvements can be beneficial to wildlife. Some pesticides
are more specific than others and these do less environmental
damage; they may be more expensive however. Sledge-hammer methods
to reduce pesticide use, such as the proposed pesticide tax, would
probably be counterproductive since it would force farmers to
adopt the cheapest option.
— Ensure that government-funded schemes
to support wildlife in the countryside also goes to those who
have continued to maintain wildlife-friendly farms. Traditional
farmers have had few opportunities for grant aid to maintain the
habitats they have retained, whereas modernising farmers have
been paid grants to put back habitat that they may have taken
out in a previous decade.
— Recognise that GM technology perhaps
may lead to some better farming systems from a wildlife perspective.
GM varieties of cotton in southern USA together with changes in
tillage have resulted in improvements in numbers of quail, for
example.
— Increase funding for agri-environment
schemes so that they can be more widely taken up and are more
financially worthwhile.
— Try to ensure that grant schemes
retain incentives to keep the local character of farming appropriate
to the area. Tree planting grants, for example, are inappropriate
in Natural Areas with an open character. Current Environmentally
Sensitive Area schemes do this.
— More trained advice may be needed
to help farmers make agronomic decisions that are wildlife-friendly
as well as financially sound.
— Cross-compliance may be a useful
tool to ensure that every farmer in receipt of a subsidy does
something for the environment. This will be little hardship for
the traditional farmer who has retained hedgerows and hay meadows,
but will require concessions from those farmers who have pushed
arable production to the limit.
— Field margins are critical to retaining
wildlife in the cereal ecosystem. We need widespread support for
managing these in a way that conserves the weed flora and dependent
insect and bird life.
— Ensure that Government agriculture
regulations do not have damaging biodiversity consequences. The
recent IACS rule changes in field boundary width are an obvious
case in point.
The Game Conservancy Trust, with its partner
charity the Allerton Research and Education Trust, has pioneered
many wildlife-friendly techniques at its farm at Loddington in
Leicestershire. These are illustrated in our new publication "Lowland
Agriculture into the 21st Century" which we have submitted
along with this memorandum.
Dr Stephen Tapper
April 2000
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