School of Sustainability

Half the wheat, one and a half times the money

Around Göttingen, winter wheat is grown three ways. Some fields are farmed conventionally, with no environmental intervention - these are the control fields. Some carry a strip of wildflowers along the edge, paid for under European Union environmental schemes. And some are farmed organically. A research team that included scientists from the University of Göttingen set out to compare the three properly - not in trial plots, but across nine landscapes in the area, over two full growing years.

The ecological result was nearly a draw. Both the wildflower strips and the organic management raised biodiversity by something like 20 to 30 per cent against the plain conventional fields. If the question is only about birds, insects and plants, either intervention does the job, and the EU subsidy attached to each is buying roughly the same amount of life.

The economics pulled the two apart. The organic fields yielded only half as much wheat per hectare as the conventional ones - the figure that is usually quoted to end the argument. But they returned one and a half times the profit, making them the most profitable of the three arrangements studied. The wildflower strips, for all their ecological merit, did not come out on top on the money. The work was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

What this summary of the study cannot tell us is who those nine landscapes belong to, what the conversion years cost the growers, or whether the premium holds if many more farmers follow. The source reports the comparison - three management types, nine landscapes, two years, control fields included - but not the people inside it. Those are the questions a neighbour would ask first, and they remain open.

Regeneration International · Read the source