Up to a billion Euros spent across the European Union on environmentally friendly farming each year could be going to waste. A Dutch scientist has found that a large 鈥榞reen farming鈥� project in the Netherlands, designed to benefit wildlife, does not work.
For 20 years, Dutch farmers have been paid to delay the spring mowing of their grass fields until June, to encourage birds to nest and hatch their chicks in safety. Until now, nobody thought to check if the birds liked the idea. They don鈥檛, says David Kleijn of Wageningen Agricultural University.
Kleijn compared bird life on 78 fields managed in this way with nearby fields managed conventionally. He found 鈥渘o positive effect on birds species diversity鈥�. In fact, most common birds nested less often. These included the oystercatcher and black-tailed godwit. The Netherlands is by far Europe鈥檚 largest breeding ground for both species.
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Kleijn believes the plan backfired because it fell into an 鈥渆cological trap鈥�.
鈥淏irds avoided the eco-fields because the soils contained fewer earthworms,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey feared going hungry.鈥� Why were there fewer worms? Because late mowing meant farmers were applying less nitrogen fertiliser to the fields.
Happy exception
Since 1992, the European Union has copied the Dutch plan for environmental management of farmland. A fifth of EU farms now participate, at a cost to the Common Agricultural Policy of an estimated 1.7 billion Euros. Kleijn believes many such initiatives will fail because the science underpinning them is flawed.
鈥淭hey are based on simple observations that a certain system is associated with high biodiversity. So it is assumed that reintroducing some elements of those systems will improve things. But ecosystems are more complex than that.鈥�
But there is one happy exception. Will Peach of Britain鈥檚 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says a scheme that paid farmers to keep stubble on their fields in winter caused an 83 per cent rise in the population of the endangered cirl bunting in south Devon, compared to surrounding fields.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 413, p 723)