This decline in diversity leaves farming more vulnerable. “If all of our pollination is reliant upon just a small number of species and something happens to those species, then there’s nothing to fill that gap. That’s one of the values of diverse insect populations – a sort of insurance policy.”
The changes in farming practices have been profound, he adds. “In the 19th century, set-aside was very common: farmers would leave a field to go fallow, or maybe sow a crop of something like red clover and then dig it in to build up the fertility of the soil. By the 20th century, when inorganic nitrogen fertilizers started to be produced, suddenly there was no need to have those fallow periods or to use clovers – and so farmers could intensify production and use fields all year around. Therefore that fallow field, that habitat, that resource to be used by pollinators has disappeared. That was a massive landscape-level change.”
This decline in diversity leaves farming more vulnerable. “If all of our pollination is reliant upon just a small number of species and something happens to those species, then there’s nothing to fill that gap. That’s one of the values of diverse insect populations – a sort of insurance policy.”The changes in farming practices have been profound, he adds. “In the 19th century, set-aside was very common: farmers would leave a field to go fallow, or maybe sow a crop of something like red clover and then dig it in to build up the fertility of the soil. By the 20th century, when inorganic nitrogen fertilizers started to be produced, suddenly there was no need to have those fallow periods or to use clovers – and so farmers could intensify production and use fields all year around. Therefore that fallow field, that habitat, that resource to be used by pollinators has disappeared. That was a massive landscape-level change.”
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