School of Sustainability

Half the wheat, one and a half times the profit

A strip of wildflowers along the edge of a winter wheat field is an easy thing to like, and the European Union pays for it as an environmentally friendly measure. Organic farming attracts the same support. Around Göttingen, an international research team including researchers from the university there set out to ask which of the two delivers more - for the wildlife in the field, and for the farmer's books at the end of the season.

The researchers compared winter wheat managed three ways: conventional fields with a strip of wildflowers, organically farmed fields, and conventional fields with no environmental intervention at all, kept as a control. They followed nine landscapes in the Göttingen area across two years. Both measures lifted biodiversity by 20 to 30 per cent against the control, so on wildlife the flower strip and the organic field were near equals. The results appeared in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

On money, the two measures parted company. The organic fields yielded only half as much wheat as the conventional ones, which on the usual reckoning would end the argument. Yet their profits ran one and a half times higher, and the published account does not say where that gain comes from. What remains is a comparison between a whole field changed and a field decorated at its edge: both are paid for as green farming, and only one changed what the farmer took home.

Regeneration International · Read the source

The helicopters took thirty hours; the rewetted peat did not burn

This summer a wildfire the size of Dundee burned through RSPB Abernethy and Glenmore in the Cairngorms. More than a hundred volunteers joined the fire crews to bring it under control. The helicopters that finally dropped water on it took thirty hours to arrive, because the ones based in Scotland had been sent south to fight fires in England and Wales. Earlier the same summer, a megafire at Dava and Carrbridge had covered 45 square miles of moorland, an area the size of Manchester.

Almost every one of these fires is started by a person - a campfire, a dropped cigarette on tinder-dry ground - and warmer, drier summers are making the consequences worse. The Cairngorms now bans summer campfires by byelaw, with signs on every road into the park. But the arguing that followed this fire, much of it aimed at blaming rewilders, missed where the evidence points. The Dava fire took hold on land managed for sheep and shooting.

The more useful story is what was already in place. The Cairngorms National Park's Climate Adaptation Fund had granted £300,000 this year to fourteen business and community groups, and twelve of those grants bought firefighting machinery and equipment - much of it deployed against this fire. There are calls now for something like a mountain rescue model for wildfire: local people who know the terrain, gamekeepers among them, equipped and ready rather than waiting on helicopters.

The longer defence is wetter ground. Rewetted peatland, beaver wetlands, woods of moisture-holding native broadleaves, rivers allowed to wiggle again and floodplains reconnected - all of it stores water where the landscape would naturally keep it. Cattle grazing takes fuel loads down where rewetting is not possible. It is noted that rewetted peatland and naturally grazed areas appear to have escaped the worst of this fire. Newly restored ground can burn in the short term, which is an argument for firebreaks and grazing, not against the restoration.

The Scottish Rewilding Alliance is now asking the government to convene a Landscape Resilience Summit - land managers from every sector, emergency services, communities and scientists in one room. The exchange it wants is specific: gamekeepers have decades of firebreak-building and suppression craft to hand on, and rewilders can help them rebuild habitats that hold water and resist flame. The author is blunt that another inquiry would be the worst outcome: the lessons from previous fires were learnt, a plan exists, and too little of it has been done.

Trees for Life · Read the source